FreeBSD 12.0-RELEASE was released today, and that means it’s time to upgrade 2 of FreeBSD 11.2 machines to this latest version. One of my FreeBSD boxes is a desktop used at work, and the upgrade went well without any issues. In this post, I’m going to document how the upgrade is done on my nas server at home. First ensure that the FreeBSD is up to date: root@nas:~ # freebsd-update fetch src component not installed, skipped Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 2 mirrors found. Fetching metadata signature for 11.2-RELEASE from update1.freebsd.org... done. Fetching metadata index... done. Inspecting system... done. Preparing to download files... done. No updates needed to update system to 11.2-RELEASE-p6. Begin to perform the upgrade: ...

To manage firewalld on a desktop, I use the module created by Craig Dunn available at https://github.com/crayfishx/puppet-firewalld. Recently, I came across this issue for the second time after restarting puppetserver: # puppet agent -vt Info: Using configured environment 'production' Info: Retrieving pluginfacts Info: Retrieving plugin Info: Loading facts Error: Could not retrieve catalog from remote server: Error 500 on SERVER: Server Error: Evaluation Error: Error while evaluating a Resource Statement, Evaluation Error: Error while evaluating a Resource Statement, Could not autoload puppet/type/firewalld_rich_rule: /etc/puppetlabs/code/modules/firewalld/lib/puppet_x/firewalld/property/rich_rule_action.rb:10: unknown type of %string if value.keys.sort != %i[action type] ^ at /etc/puppetlabs/code/modules/firewalld/manifests/init.pp:135:7 on node mathtxx Warning: Not using cache on failed catalog Error: Could not retrieve catalog; skipping run Previously, the problem seem to disappear after awhile, and because I’ve been occupied with other tasks, I kinda forgot about it. ...

After spending almost 8 weeks preparation, I finally took the Red Hat Certified Engineer (RHCE) exam yesterday. I found the questions are not very difficult, however it’s very easy to make mistakes. The exam duration is 3.5 hours and I had about 15 minutes left when I completed the last question. Having done the the Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA) before, I remember if you receive an email from Red Hat with an attachment, that implies that you pass the exam. Well, the grade came back within 2 hours after exam, and this time there was no attachment. Oh my! ...

As a ThinkPad fan, I really like X1 Carbon (G6). I run Fedora 28 on it, and almost everything runs flawlessly. One issue that bothers me a lot is problem with suspend. The X1 Carbon G6 supports S0i3 instead of the S3. Without the S3, when the laptop is put to suspended, the battery continue to drain and sometimes the cpu fan keeps running. Fortunately, this issue has been recently addressed by Lenovo through firmware update. According to the wiki.archlinux.org, S3 can be enabled in BIOS from BIOS version 1.30 or newer. ...

This is like a re-post of a question from askubuntu.com. To get to that post, I usually had to google it. So, I’ll post it here so I know where to look for when I need it again. At work, we use WPA2-Enterprise for wireless connection. To create a new connection on my laptop with wlp3s0 as Wifi device, follow this step: # nmcli con add type wifi ifname wlp3s0 con-name work-wifi ssid work-ssid # nmcli con edit id work-wifi nmcli> set ipv4.method auto nmcli> set 802-1x.eap peap nmcli> set 802-1x.phase2-auth mschapv2 nmcli> set 802-1x.identity myusername nmcli> set 802-1x.password mypassword nmcli> set wifi-sec.key-mgmt wpa-eap nmcli> save nmcli> activate That’s it if you know how to do it. ...