Tagged in: machine, projects, freebsd

§ presentation

So in late September, I acquired a HPE microserver Gen10 because:

• it’s tiny
• it’s cheap (267€, incl. taxes & shipping)
• it’s got 4 SATA ports

So it’s a sweet little black cube of what should have been pure awesomeness. Slap four WD40EZRZ in this bad boy and you get a sort of really cheap home NAS system.

ONWARDS, let’s install FreeBSD!

§ install

Haha, well shit. Console is broken, so there’s no hope in doing a blind install because the installer requires a console to actually run. The bug report being thorough and complete, though, I quickly jumped to my only other known fallback system: mfsbsd.

mfsbsd does two things that the official boot media doesn’t:

• it starts sshd at boot
• it launches dhclient at boot on all interfaces

With a bit of arp -a, it was easy to identify the new machine, ssh into it, and run bsdinstall from there. Only problem was that bsdinstall complained about a missing file at /usr/freebsd-dist/MANIFEST that I had to download from elsewhere (a FreeBSD mirror).

§ (fun) facts

• those were Torx screws. Screw you HP.
• downloading the latest BIOS update is impossible. Fuck you, HP.
• Ubuntu booted fine with a working console on the machine, but couldn’t see the HDDs. Rather problematic for a NAS system.
• FreeBSD had a broken console but works otherwise fine.