phaq

Whilst playing around with FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi, I started to dig into cross-compiling packages.

Well, if you follow the first tutorial you’ll surely notice that there is no real speed-gain, because the use of full binary emulation on a x86 host through QEMU. So this is almost as slow as if packages were natively compiled on the Raspberry Pi itself even if done on a multi-cpu Xeon powerhouse.

So let’s see how to get an actually performance gain.

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Anyone remember these adorable blueish 1U servers made by Cobalt Networks?

While I was never in true love with the Cobalt OS itself, I actually liked the Cobalts Raq enclosure.
So much that I salvaged one while cleaning out a data center last summer. I decided to grant it a second live as a media center box running OSMC.
And of course it’s powered by a Respberry Pi. Nowadays there’s simply no way around those nice little boxes 😉
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While it’s the recommend way to do, managing your objects and rules solely through Check Point SmartDashboard may be cumbersome.
Bad enough, there exists no real CLI interface, that would allow for real scripting. Well, there exists DBEDIT, which allows for automated creation of objects and even rules … sort of.
However there’s barely official documentation about it, if not Martin Hoz had taken the time to write the very useful Object Filler utility, which you find over at the Check Point User Group.

And unless you don’t want to go into the Check Point OPSEC API, DBEDIT (by the help of Object Filler) is the way to go.
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Hi Folks, here’s my writeup to conclude yesterdays post on crosscompiling arm6v packages for the Raspberry Pi.

Today I’m gonna quickly explain how to expose the packages repository via http from your build server.

This is part 3 of of my series of post related to FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi.

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Hi again. My last post covered the installation of FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi.

Here’s part 2 of my series on that topic.

As I pointed out last time there’s currently only few experimental packages around, and yet, those few repositories out there are far from being complete.

So it’s about time to see how to build packages for the Raspberry Pi on FreeBSD.
As the Pi isn’t very fast, it’s a good thing to look into cross-compiling packages.

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Tonight I went along to fire up FreeBSD on a Raspberry Pi.
Although I’m in for Linux on a day-to-day basis, my heart truely belongs to the BSDish world.
So why not run FreeBSD on the Pi? Especially since I have an idea in mind to build a very specialized and compact access point for one of my ongoing projects.

A good starting point for this is at https://wiki.freebsd.org/FreeBSD/arm.
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Bevore we start:

I shall not use this on production servers. I shall not use this on production servers. I shall not use this on production servers. I shall not use this on production servers.

[Daaa daadidaada daa dadada daaa] (The Simpson theme rolling …)

Umm… where was I? Right, enabling a software RAID on XenServer 6.2. Possible? Yes. Recommended? No. Field of use: Poor techies like unable to afford a hardware RAID controller for a simple test box 😉
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Apple’s OS X has an easy way to rip a CD/DVD image using Disk Utility program.
However, you’ll end up with a file in that is not in ISO format, thus utterly useless if you want to re-use the file for virtualization purposes or on another operating system unable to handle those .cdr files.

For a one-shot option, OS X provides everything to convert the .cdr to .iso files, which is outlined at http://imacify.com/2013/06/how-to-create-iso-disc-image-from-cddvd-in-mac-os-x/.

If you do however plan to rip a lot (and I mean, a lot!) of CDs/DVDs to ISO files on OS X, here’s a little bash script I came up with.

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Well, here’s just a quick snippet on how to intercept Cisco’s “write net” command.

Why would I want to do it? Because people are lazy and tend to forget.
So instead of forcing them to remember, that they need to add the ‘/incoming’ directory for config writebacks,
I just let an EEM applet do the trick.

How is it working?

The EEM applet is intercepting the ‘write net’ cli command by matching all inputs against the pattern given.
Whenever the command is seen, it will run my own commands instead. Nice, huh? ;-?

Enough talking, here’s the code:

no event manager applet WRITENET
event manager applet WRITENET
event cli pattern “write net” sync yes
action 1.0 puts “Please wait …”
action 1.5 cli command “enable”
action 2.0 cli command “conf t”
action 2.1 cli command “file prompt quiet”
action 2.2 cli command “exit”
action 3.0 cli command “copy run tftp://tftp01/incoming/”
action 4.0 cli command “conf t”
action 4.1 cli command “no file prompt quiet”
action 4.2 cli command “exit”
action 5.0 puts “Copy stored to TFTP server at /incoming, good bye”

**** UPDATED 2018/04/27 ***

Arduino is super cool, I really love that thing, but …

Who would really want to put a fully-featured Arduino board into each and every project, at least when they’re built to more like a permanent setting?
I guess nobody. Honestly, an Arduino is not expensive to buy, but to expensive, if you want to put dozens of them in place.

So, why not put just the ATmega chip, which drives every Arduino at its heart, inside and leave all the rest away?

This is what this post The RRRRRRRRRRBBA, a $3 Arduino talks about: Just provide power to the ATmega and get rid of all the bells and whistles. You can even spare the oscillator and the resistors.

Well, this is exactly what I wanted. But since I didn’t have the proper gear at hands to flash the ATmega chip, I first had to look into another topic, namely how to turn your existing Arduino into an ASP (in-system programmer).

Here’s some of the pages I came along:

Arduino ISP
Arduino to Breadboard
The Arduino Micro schematic
Arduino Leonardo as ISP
Arduino Micro as ISP and atTiny84A

But I soon found that doing so with an Arduino Micro, the only one I had available at that time, is not as straight forward as with other Arduino boards.
So I did this writeup to cover my findings on this.
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