Hi there ! I have a little box at home, hosting some little services for personal use under freebsd with a full disk encryption (geli). I’m never at home and long power outage often occurs so I always need to come back home to type my passphrase to decrypt the disk.
I was searching this week a solution to do it remotely and found the “poor-guy-kvm” solutions turning a Raspberry like board (beaglebone black in my case) in a hid keyboard. It works fine once the computer has booted but once reboot when the passphrase is asked before it loads the loader menu, nothing. When I plug an ordinary USB keyboard I can type my passphrase so USB module is loaded.
Am I missing something ? Am I trying something impossible ?
(I could’ve asked on freebsd forum but… Have to suscribe, presentation, etc… Long journey)
Like someone already mentioned, you can use dracut-ssh for rpm-based distros or dropbear-initramfs for deb-based distros. My idea would be to use debian as host and virtualize or dockerize the freebsd system/software part.
Thanks for your answer but… I like freebsd as a host
Tried to help :P What’s your take on using freebsd instead of linux? More security?
No problem, I appreciate ;) I hope my answer was not too rude !
At the beginning to try something different, curiosity. I’ve began to write a comparison but in fact I can not doing that because I never used Linux for self hosted services, just for user things like… Checking my mails. I find it easier for that side.
But, for example , after setting my first jails , I’ve read how I could’ve done it on Linux. I’ve found lxc (for example) hard to learn and configure while chroot was not enough secure to my taste without a little bit tuning. Jail is native, it’s one conf file, easy to read and write, and four lines in rc.conf to enable it (with its own virtual network interface). With zfs it’s easy to deploy the same base system for all your jails and to maintain it update and it’s fully isolated. Want to enable another service ? Write theservice_load=“YES” in rc.conf. no systemd linking with some file or whatever I don’t know. Same if you want an additional virtual network (+1 more line). Customizing your kernel, build it and installing it is one conf file to edit +4 for short command line (don’t know how to do on Linux)…
Again it’s not a comparison, it’s just why I stay with freebsd, maybe it’s more comfortable to me because I’m not doing real hard security things, I’m not a pro sysadmin , but I found doing and learning those things (customizing kernel, jails and other things) was (really) easy when reading the clear docs. And many security things are native.
Sorry for the long answer ^
Your answer wasn’t rude at all :) and thanks for the long one! Looks like I should try FreeBSD again, last time I was just overwhelmed, but that’s many years ago. My last try was OPNsense which didn’t work like I wanted it to (stupid IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel, which didn’t properly reconnect after the 24h ISP disconnection and my script to fix this fucked up latency and gaming wasn’t possible because of stutters (probably packet loss too)). Security is the main aspect of my try to use it. Linux can be like a swiss cheese if misconfigured. Still better than Windows (Server) tho xD
Yeah, not hard to do better than windows ! ;) I thought freebsd has many improvements each new versions so if your try was many years ago maybe you will find something interesting today… Or maybe not ;) It wasn’t possible to fix the latency because of people who suffered of speech disorder ?
What? xD The script used the DSL modems IPv6 WAN IP to set up the IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel (to get IPv4 working) each time my ISP dropped the connection after 24h (standard DSL procedure over here in DE) or rnd reconnection. But somehow that script triggered a higher latency and probably packet loss/delay (couldn’t measure it, cause it only appeared in fast paced shooters like MW2019). Without the script everything ran fine except IPv4 after disconnections, which had to be setup manually. After that I sent the DSL modem back and returned to my AVM FritzBox as my main router. Can’t really say if it was directly the scripts fault or sth else in my OPNsense setup (low powered CPU, USB ethernet adapter, 4 port gbit LAN PCIe card, defective RAM, …). Maybe I’ll try a similar setup again some time, because I kinda liked OPNsense…
You said
I searched what ‘stutters’ mean, I don’t know this word, and I’ve just found the definition of people who suffer of speech disorder :)
I wouldn’t trust USB Ethernet adapter if latency is important to me but maybe I’m wrong it’s just superstition. I’ve just used one time OPNsense for the work and just for checking some network information but I remember saying it was a nice web ui haha
Ah, yeah stutters has different meanings. One being people with a speech disorder and the other one is usually used for display issues (like tearing). It felt like I was using a low refresh rate screen with really low fps, but had 144Hz and 144 fps xD
USB can ramp up latency for sure, should be because of I/O overhead, which usually is ignorable when the HW is fast enough ime.
Now my fingers are itchy to try FreeBSD and OPNsense again, haha. Like I haven’t already enough stuff to do and test…