I am finally starting to make a dent in the pile of things I could be using, but aren't. A friend gave me a motherboard, case, graphics card and power supply over about 18 months, in the past fortnight I finally put it all together and had a working computer.

The machine came up no problem, one of the drives I recycled from another machine and it already had FreeBSD on it. It turns out the motherboard I was given doesn't want to boot from USB at all.

We tried all the different configurations and eventually fell back to using PXE. There is an excellent graphic PXE boot environment available from netboot.xyz , there was a FreeBSD entry in the OS boot menu, but it this is not a supported boot method for FreeBSD.

netboot.xyz uses a mfsboot FreeBSD image to launch a live system over PXE. The image is created with a set of scripts available on github . FreeBSD supports booting from a bundled memory image configured with the kernel config, it looks like that is the feature that makes all of this possible.

It is Sunday, so that makes seven days of writing .

Reading: Gun Machine, The Difference Engine

Ode To My Family #comic #sysadmin #linux #development #CloudComputing https://t.co/hu0A3odXn2 pic.twitter.com/RiawlwbyzA

— turnoff.us (@turnoff_us) March 9, 2017

Not that I can fix any of those either.

I set up ssl with Let's Encrypt for an experiment yesterday following a handy guide on the FreeBSD wiki . The guide suggested this mozilla tool for generating server configs with good parameters.

With the tool I was only able to hit an A rating on the ssllabs testing site, the A+ rating was annoyingly elusive. I am using nginx as vhost for a go web service, for HSTS a header has to be appended to the response. The config from Mozilla does this for nginx like this:

# HSTS (ngx_http_headers_module is required) (15768000 seconds = 6 months)
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=15768000;

But, the hosted application has control over the response headers. nginx can be configured to always set the header with the always flag:

# HSTS (ngx_http_headers_module is required) (15768000 seconds = 6 months)
add_header Strict-Transport-Security "max-age=15768000" always;

Reading: Gun Machine, The Difference Engine

pic.twitter.com/Di70dMOrsB

— Archillect (@archillect) March 9, 2017

There is nothing good to report, maybe running a good old fashioned tool can help?

Reading: Gun Machine, The Difference Engine

Imagine a world where the actual CIA spends its time figuring out how to spy on you through your TV. That's today. https://t.co/dQHBrsyIoI

— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) March 7, 2017

It is the end of the world!

The collection of Japanese faces is the best part of the leak ◕ ◡ ◕ .

Reading: Gun Machine, The Difference Engine

This is an article on 802.11 and its problems , the picture is from there and it is awesome.

Reading: Gun Machine