was making a write up, clean document to describe my problem for the mailing list, but my ipfw nat issues seem to actually start from 14.4 already. Did a fresh install 14.3, nat, jails all work fine. Then did upgrade to 14.4, starts with my default nameserver doesnt work, change it to 1.1.1.1, then dns/ping work, but tcp does not anymore.

half the times i ask questions in here, people send me a link to manual pages on freebsd.org . . . but now i’m looking for that manual and I can’t find it??

oh ok i found it, the web page has a glitch. if its too narrow, the table of contents dissapears and you are stick helpless on the Abstract intro page

GoSox: Are you using, or do you have access to, a machine running FreeBSD?

i do, although not the machine I am IRC’ing on at the moment

the FreeBSD Handbook was the doc page I was looking for

The man pages are installed on the system, no need to find them on the web if you have access to the OS

i’m not talking about the manpages i’m talking about the handbook

Ok :)

GoSox, pkg install en-freebsd-doc then view the /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/handbook_en.pdf file.

Or view the html: firefox /usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/en/books/handbook/index.html

or just use the website :D

Yes. But you said the web site had a problem for you. Viewing the PDF would work around that.

slightly resizing my browser window fixed it, i guess i didn’t actually say that

ok sooooooo i have questions

so i’m reading about networks and the docs are explaining how i can set IP settings with ifconfig or using sysrc but like… are the current network settings saved to a file somewhere? can I just edit that file?

/etc/rc.conf

ifconfig_interface="" i.e., ifconfig_ue0="DHCP"

all sysrc does is try to safely edit /etc/rc.conf

ah gotcha

so i assume if i change my ip via editing rc.conf, that change only gets applied after a reboot?

service netif restart

service routing restart

you shouldn't have to reboot

anything that requires a reboot is questionable

ok

so question about the network interface names, where do those names come from? in the manual you see something like “em0"

typically on in Macos i’ll see something like “en0” or “en1”

but on this mac mini running freebsd, my ethernt is named “bge0” ??

they come from the device driver

broadcom gigabit ethernet

bge

em0 intel e1000

ohhh

the exception is wireless devices where we have a virtualised framework which is needed to support multiple virtual devices

so wifi devices are always wlanX

gotcha

so what does this do: ipv6="inet6 accept_rtadv"`

the begining got cropped there,

it configures ipv6 for hte interface and router advertisements

which characters are allowed in the hostname?

hostnames must start with [a-z] and can contain [a-z0-9-], also in freebsd hostname is usually an fqdn, so it may contain '.', in which case those restrictions apply to each label in the fqdn

no capitals?

the kernel will let you set any hostname you want, more or less, but anything that doesn't meet those restrictions isn't a valid DNS name, so it's not very useful

GoSox: case insensitive, capitals are fine

oh ok

(actually, i think hostnames can start with [a-z0-9], but i strongly recommend not doing that since some (badly written) software will confuse it with an IP address)

wow look at me go, i have managed to change my IP address!

every server i’ve had for the last like… 15 years or so, has been an Apple Xserve. I feel like calling the new one Xserve again just out o fhabbit, even though its most likely going to be an HP proliant

ok i got to the end of the network section and didn’t see anything about setting up multiple different IPs on the same ethernet interface.

ifconfig add <addr>

add Another name for the alias parameter. Introduced for

compatibility with BSD/OS.

alias then

oh its not called multihoming?

there are possibly many things with different names

I've never done this in anger

I would expect multi homing to be using multiple interfaces though

ahh well on my production server, i need to do both

have two ethernet interfaces, and one of those interfaces will have two IPs, the ther just one

but i don’t physically have it, or any machine with two ethernet ports in my house that i can test with so this part of my setup might have to wait till its go time to be worked out

use a jail or a virtual machine

alright lets see if the alias works and i can get two IPs at once

if so I’ll call it quits for the night

all you freebsd peeps in here, are you also on the freebsd.org forum?

damn, only one ip seems to be working

oh damnit, i set the same ip twice, oops

hmmm os `defaultrouter` the same as the router or gateway IP in a regular mac or pc network config?

and if so, how do i set different routers for different network interfaces? on the real server, each ethernet port is connected to differnet networks entirely so each has its own router address

look at the routing chapter of the handbook

this is a weird offtopic question, sorry

can anyone load mwl.io ?

yup loads for me

yes

i'm getting a 256bit unknown key type

#(*)!@#*!@#

finally, a question i know the answer to :P

ok i got my multiple IPs on one interface and the output of ifconfig on my freebsd machine looks just like the output on my current macos server with dual ethernet

so i think i’m done now and ill work on the routing stuff another time

unless nacelle has any more easy questions :D

hmm so on a machine with multiple network interfaces, how is it determined which one is the default for new outgoing connections if you don’t explicitely pick one?

Hi, docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/book/#bsdinstall-installation-type has its image (docs.freebsd.org/images/books/handb…tall-distributions-sets-pkgbase.png) leading to a 404. Does it 404 for you as well?

yes the image link gives me a 404

and also a 404 if you check the HTTP headers here with that url: whatsmyip.org/http-headers

That packages installation type sounds pretty useful. Makes updates to the base a bit more granular too, right? Instead of entire base system getting updated, now only relevant packages get updates, which I'd guess also makes it easier to choose after which updates to reboot.

join #macosx

ForeverNoob[m]: actually, it's the opposite: freebsd-update was more granular because it only updates specific files which changed, pkgbase update has to update an entire package at once. but in practice, that's not an issue

Interesting. It's been a while since I've used FBSD so this is pretty new to me. I'll try to read up on this later.

hrm. i've been using zrepl for a long time to manage local snapshots, but i can't seem to find a way to have it do a dry run to let me check a new pruning config. anyone have ideas?

Anyone in the UK, there is a FOSS meetup in London next month: mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/gllug/2026-April/083787.html

Wow. Just got a barrage of mailing list notifications. :)

Macer: there was broken routing at the DC that hosts mailing lists for a few hours

Ah ok lol.

What are the chances I can use a non-/usr/bin clang to buildworld/kernel?

skered, I seem to recall that people have done that. I am curious as to why you want to do it though.

I'm using clangd21 and wanted to see if it fixed something I was with vim/coc when built with clang21 vs base clang

From what I'm reading it shouldn't matter though.

Ah... Thanks for explaining. I think it should work. And yes people do build the system with different clang versions routinely. And find issues around changes in clang.

I think I got it... wiki.freebsd.org/ExternalToolchain Needed XCC XCPP XCXX. I was trying the non-X names.

Primary: Thanks for all the hard work putting together the OS. Secondary: Minor observations, CUPS test page has a penguin on it and firefox-esr claims in user agent to be linux, wonder why

AND THE LAND OF THE FREEEEEEEEEEEEEEE

AND THE HOME OF THE BSD......

Please don't.

Please do.

doas

joepublic, When firefox claimed FreeBSD in the User-Agent I could not log into chase.com bank. I had to override it to Linux in order for the site not to block me. I imagine that is why the package maintainer switched it.

as a web developer for 25 years, i hate the utter shit show that the user-agent header has turned in to

At one time there was a web comic about this. Two younger folks were talking about linux and how good it was. And in the second frame they both decided that FreeBSD was the best linux they had used. It was one of those tragicomical comics meant to show how sad the world is about actually understanding these things.

Thanks, unfortunate that banks might be so picky on the user agent field of all things

Bots are also spoofing the User-Agent heavily and that is one way to identify them. They will randomly choose a string from a pool of past User-Agent strings. Some of them are too old to be valid. It's now common to block based upon User-Agent string. Which I hate but I do it too.

Blame the AI scraper plague. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I identify bots by old and unlikely user agent strings too, guess I am part of the problem

after a brief test, I have concluded that Truist bank does not mind if your user agent string says FreeBSD in it. :)

i wonder if i spoofed mine twitch would stop punishing me

too old to be valid UAs are still genuinely seen on the interwebs, usually via a proxy

To be fair, I am not blocking them, merely marking them in my logs as bots as opposed to likely human-generated traffic