Better Living Through Thinking

SOCKS5 Proxy Server on FreeBSD

Tue, 31 Oct 2006

For several years I ran the Dante proxy server and was generally happy with it. I chose it mainly because it was easy to install from FreeBSD ports, and had a few good tutorials on how to use it.

I rarely had to restart it, but I noticed that it forked a lot of processes for various tasks (probably tunable, but I never learned how to tune it), and was not always reliable (I'd have to sometimes retry ...

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Upgrading Milter-Greylist

Mon, 12 Sep 2005

Upgrading milter-greylist from 1.6.1 to 2.0:

cd /usr/ports/mail/milter-greylist
make
(read the README and Changes files for items)
(noticed a new line in the .mc file: confMILTER_MACROS_ENVRCPT, so I
add that)
(noticed that the whitelist syntax is different than before: have to
add 'acl whitelist' in front of 'rcpt' and 'domain' directives now)
...

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Releasing a DHCP lease

Tue, 05 Jul 2005

I was getting a bogus IP from my ISP the other day and my FreeBSD firewall was having a tough time getting connectivity. I found this page:

<http://www.moundalexis.com/archives/000054.php>

which says this:

In this case the active interface is sis0, so here is the command to
...

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xset is good to know

Thu, 19 May 2005

xset is one of those programs I keep learning how useful it is.

I just (re-)learned how to turn off/on DPMS support in X:

# xset -dpms

Querying the results:

# xset q
...

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Milter-Regex Problems

Wed, 18 May 2005

I'm seeing lines like this in my log:

May 11 15:29:51 foo sm-mta[24407]: j5HAduFf025412: Milter 
(milter-regex): local socket name /var/spool/milter-regex/sock
unsafe

I looked and there was no sock file there. 'ps' revealed no milter-regex running at all :(

Starting milter-regex seems to have solved the problem.

Setting up a Wireless Gateway

Wed, 18 May 2005

I've had a wireless router behind my FreeBSD firewall for about 8 months now. It worked mostly fine except for the fact that I had to unplug and re-plug it in every other day. It's a Netgear WGB (fixme)

I thought for the longest time it had something to do with my DHCP server settings. I fiddled with those a little, dropping the TTL to something like an hour instead of 12 hours.

...

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Missing Devices from FreeBSD 5.2.1 to 5.3

Mon, 28 Mar 2005

I just upgraded from FreeBSD 5.2.1 to 5.3 and encountered the following symtoms:

Mar 28 11:50:52 tub init: getty repeating too quickly on port
/dev/ttyv8, sleeping 30 secs

After a little research (thank Google) I found an entry in freebsddiary.org where the following 2 lines were missing from the 5.2.1 GENERIC kernel config file:

...

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Upgrading FreeBSD 5.x to 5.y

Mon, 28 Mar 2005

I learned to change a few lines in the cvsup config file to get the latest stuff for kernel upgrade:

*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_2

can be changed to:

*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_3

and then you can run cvsup to get the latest codebase.

Remounting procfs

Tue, 08 Mar 2005

Find the module /modules/procfs.ko. Now do this:

umount -f /proc
kldunload procfs
kldload procfs
mount /proc

Doesn't that feel better?

Mounting a USB drive

Thu, 26 Aug 2004

• Insert the USB drive into the slot
• check the output of dmesg to see if it mounted (mine mounts on da0)
• as root: mount_msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /mnt
• (do stuff on /mnt)
• umount /mnt
• remove USB drive