Recent posts

Running OpenBSD as an UEFI virtual machine (on a Raspberry Pi)

9 minute read

I started to migrate all the services that I use on my internal network to my Raspberry Pi 4 cluster. I migrated my FreeBSD jails to BastileBSD on a virtual machine running on a Raspberry Pi. See my blog post on how to migrate from ezjail to BastilleBSD. https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/2023/09/10/migrate-from-ezjail-to-bastille-part1-introduction-to-bastillebsd/

tianocore

Running FreeBSD as a virtual machine with UEFI on ARM64 came to the point that it just works. I have to use QEMU with u-boot to get FreeBSD up and running on the Raspberry Pi as a virtual machine with older FreeBSD versions: https://stafwag.github.io/blog/blog/2021/03/14/howto_run_freebsd_as_vm_on_pi/.

But with the latest versions of FreeBSD ( not sure when it started to work, but it works on FreeBSD 14) you can run FreeBSD as a virtual machine on ARM64 with UEFI just like on x86 on GNU/Linux with KVM.

UEFI on KVM is in general provided by the open-source tianocore project.

I didn’t find much information on how to run OpenBSD with UEFI on x86 or ARM64.

OpenBSD 7.4

So I decided to write a blog post about it, in the hope that this information might be useful to somebody else. First I tried to download the OpenBSD 7.4 ISO image and boot it as a virtual machine on KVM (x86). But the iso image failed to boot on a virtual with UEFI enabled. It looks like the ISO image only supports a legacy BIOS.

ARM64 doesn’t support a “legacy BIOS”. The ARM64 download page for OpenBSD 7.4 doesn’t even have an ISO image, but there is an install-<version>.img image available. So I tried to boot this image on one of my Raspberry Pi systems and this worked. I had more trouble getting NetBSD working as a virtual machine on the Raspberry Pi but this might be a topic for another blog post :-)

You’ll find my journey with my installation instructions below.

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Getting started with GitLab-CE. Part 1: Installation

12 minute read

CI/CD Platform Overview

When you want or need to use CI/CD you have a lot of CI/CD platforms where you can choose from. As with most “tools”, the tool is less important. What (which flow, best practices, security benchmarks, etc) and how you implement it, is what matters.

One of the most commonly used options is Jenkins.

I used and still use Jenkins and created a jenkins build workstation to build software and test in my homelab a couple of years back.

jenkins

Jenkins started as Hudson at Sun Microsystem(RIP). Hudson is one of the many open-source projects that were started at Sun and killed by Oracle. Jenkins continued as the open-source fork of Hudson.

Jenkins has evolved. If you need to do more complex things you probably end up creating a lot of groovy scripts, nothing wrong with groovy. But as with a lot of discussions about programming, the ecosystem (who is using it, which libraries are available, etc) is important.

Groovy isn’t that commonly used in and known in the system administration ecosystem so this is probably something you need to learn if you’re coming for the system administrator world ( as I do, so I learnt the basics of Groovy this way ).

The other option is to implement CI/CD using the commonly used source hosting platforms; GitHub and GitLab.

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Migrate from ezjail to BastilleBSD part 2: Migrate the Jails

6 minute read

How to migrate Jails from ezjail to BastilleBSD

daemon_hammer

In my previous blog post, I reviewed BastilleBSD. In this post, we go through the required steps to migrate the Jails from ezjail to BastilleBSD.

ezjail test Jail

To test the Jail migration, we’ll first create a test Jail with ezjail. This test Jail will migrate to a BastilleBSD Jail.

Create the test ezjail Jail

We use the ezjail-admin create staftestje001 'vtnet0|<ip>' command to create the test Jail.

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