Legends start at 1.0! – FreeBSD in 1993 (pt. 2)

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2022/fbsd1_pt2.gmi Happy FreeBSD day everyone! 🥳 In part one I covered a little bit of general information and preparation work before detailing the first part of the installation of FreeBSD 1.0 on …

Legends start at 1.0! – FreeBSD in 1993 (pt. 1)

[New to Gemini? Have a look at my Gemini FAQ.] This article was bi-posted to Gemini and the Web; Gemini version is here: gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/kraileth/neunix/2022/fbsd1_pt1.gmi In 2017, I wrote a series of articles [1], [2], [3] and [4] on FreeBSD's famous version 4.11 (and an experiment to use Pkgsrc to get modern software running on it), …

FreeBSD on SPARC64 (is dead)

This was originally my January article that I decided to postpone for another one. So it's really the February one - except for myself not getting around to publishing it before August due to... well, the world going crazy. So this is the January state of affairs for the most part. On the plus side …

Illumos (v9os) on SPARC64 SunFire v100

Over the last month or so I've written a couple of articles on an old SunFire v100 machine that I own for a while now. First I took a look at the hardware of the machine and the LOM (Lights Out Management). Then I installed OpenBSD 6.0 from CD and updated all the way to …

Running OpenBSD on SPARC64 (HTTPd, packages, patching, X11, …)

In my previous post I described the process of installing OpenBSD 6.0 on a SPARC64 machine and updating it all the way to 6.5. Now it's time to actually do something with it to get an idea of how well OpenBSD works on this architecture! OpenBSD's base system The OpenBSD team takes pride in providing …

OpenBSD on SPARC64 (6.0 to 6.5)

Earlier this year I came by an old SunFire v100 that I wrote about in my previous article. After taking a look at the hardware and the LOM, it's time to actually do something with it! And that of course means to install an operating system first. OpenBSD OpenBSD, huh? Yes, I usually write about …

A SPARC in the night – SunFire v100 exploration

While we see a total dominance of x86_64 CPUs today, there are at least some alternatives like ARM and in the long run hopefully RISC-V. But there are other interesting architectures as well - one of them is SPARC (the Scalable Processor ARChitecture). This article is purely historic, I'm not reviewing new hardware here. It's …

FreeBSD jails (1/2): Introduction and frameworks

This is the first part of a followup to the 4.11 mini-series of posts that I published here on my blog ([1], [2], [3] & [4]). Those posts covered installing an old FreeBSD 4.11 system and using pkgsrc to update some parts of the system from versions released in the last millennium (!) to those …

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (4/4) – Reflecting radical resurrection

In the first post of this mini series I wrote about legacy systems and installing FreeBSD 4.11. The second one shows how to configure the fresh system for remote access, bootstrap Pkgsrc, install Subversion to checkout FreeBSD code and update the system to the stable branch. And part three mainly deals with upgrading OpenSSH and …

Updating FreeBSD 4.11 (3/4) – Neophyte’s notorious necromancy

The first post of this mini series was about legacy systems in general and about what installing the old FreeBSD 4.11 is like. In the second one I showed the initial configuration of the system, how to SSH into it despite the obsolete DSA host key and how to bootstrap pkgsrc, NetBSD's portable ports tree. …