Use a GPG smart card with Thunderbird. Part 2: setup GnuPG on FreeBSD

July 28, 2024 19 minute read

Updated @ Mon Sep 2 07:55:20 PM CEST 2024: Added devfs section
Updated @ Wed Sep 4 07:48:56 PM CEST 2024 : Corrected gpg-agent.conf

I use FreeBSD and GNU/Linux.

In a previous blog post, we set up GnuPG with smartcard support on Debian GNU/Linux.

In this blog post, we’ll install and configure GnuPG with smartcard support on FreeBSD.

The GNU/Linux blog post provides more details about GnuPG, so it might be useful for the FreeBSD users to read it first.

Likewise, Linux users are welcome to read this blog post if they’re interested in how it’s done on FreeBSD ;-)

www.wagemakers.be

May 30, 2024 less than 1 minute read

https://www.wagemakers.be

I’ve finally found the time to give my homepage a complete makeover. Yes, HTTPS is enabled now ;-)

The content has been migrated from WebGUI to Hugo.

It still contains the same old content, but I’ll update it in the coming weeks or when some of the projects are updated.

Mask27.dev

May 20, 2024 less than 1 minute read

I started my company last year and recently had the time to create my company’s website.

https://mask27.dev

Feel free to check it out.

Use a GPG smartcard with Thunderbird. Part 1: setup GnuPG

April 21, 2024 14 minute read

I use a Free Software Foundation Europe fellowship GPG smartcard for my email encryption and package signing. While FSFE doesn’t provide the smartcard anymore it’s still available at www.floss-shop.de.

I moved to a Thinkpad w541 with coreboot running Debian GNU/Linux and FreeBSD so I needed to set up my email encryption on Thunderbird again.

It took me more time to reconfigure it again - as usual - so I decided to take notes this time and create a blog post about it. As this might be useful for somebody else … or me in the future :-)

The setup is executed on Debian GNU/Linux 12 (bookworm) with the FSFE fellowship GPG smartcard, but the setup for other Linux distributes, FreeBSD or other smartcards is very similar.

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

February 25, 2024 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/

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.

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.