FreeBSD

Subtle Indicator You've Been at the CLI Too Long Today

What you see:

What you think:

Topic: 

Installing an Intel X25-E SSD on FreeBSD 8.1

This is on an existing FreeBSD install. I'm not booting from the SSD; I'm just adding it so it will show up at /var/cache.

# mkdir /var/cache

I installed the solid-state drive on a Dell OptiPlex 755. I unplugged the SATA cable from the DVD-ROM drive (who uses optical media anymore?) and connected the cable from SATA1 on the motherboard to the SSD.

When booting, FreeBSD found the drive:

ad10: 61057MB <SSDSA2SH064G1GC INTEL 045C8860> at ata5-master UDMA100 SATA 3Gb/s

Next, I formatted it using sysinstall and fdisk using the information found in the FreeBSD Handbook. The only special thing I did was to add Newfs Opts in the Disklabel Editor to add -i 1024 since I know I'm going to have a gazillion small files and didn't want to run out of inodes.

I knew what to put in fstab by looking in the DiskLabel Editor under the "Part" column.

Here's my new /etc/fstab.

# Device		Mountpoint	FStype	Options		Dump	Pass#
/dev/twed0s1b		none		swap	sw		0	0
/dev/twed0s1a		/		ufs	rw,noatime		1	1
/dev/twed0s1d		/tmp		ufs	rw,noatime		2	2
/dev/twed0s1e		/usr		ufs	rw,noatime		2	2
/dev/twed0s1f		/var		ufs	rw,noatime		2	2
/dev/ad10s1d		/var/cache            ufs     rw,noatime              2       2
Topic: 

Drupal In BSD Magazine

Drupal is featured in the October 2010 issue of BSD Magazine (email address required to download).

Using Mac OS X 10.6 to Create a Bootable FreeBSD 8.1 Installer on a USB Memory Stick

Warning. Follow these instructions at your own risk. I am not responsible when you use dd to blow away your kitty pictures.

Download the FreeBSD 8.1 memory stick image from a FreeBSD repository. I picked one from here.

Plug in your USB stick. OS X will mount it.

You want to unmount the volume while keeping the drive available. To do this, open Disk Utility, click on the name of the mounted volume, and click the Unmount button.

Now you need to know the disk's identifier. You can find this out by right-clicking the disk in Disk Utility. The disk identifier of my USB stick was disk4.

Finally, copy the memory stick image onto the memory stick, substituting the disk identifier into this terminal command. if means "in file" and of means "out file".

dd if=/path/to/freebsd.img of=/dev/diskidentifier bs=10240 conv=sync

So the commands I issued looked like this (yours will be different, since your disk identifier will be different).

dd if=/Users/john/Downloads/FreeBSD-8.1-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/disk4 bs=10240 conv=sync

When it's done, dd says:

105018+0 records in
105018+0 records out
1075384320 bytes transferred in 1310.732002 secs (820446 bytes/sec)

That's 22 minutes.

Back to Disk Utility. Select the memory stick. Click the Eject button. Now go boot FreeBSD!

Pages

Subscribe to RSS - FreeBSD