For FreeBSD system upgrades, my # make buildkernel is instructed to use a custom kernel config at /usr/src/sys/amd64/conf/CUSTOM64. It includes:

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include GENERIC
machine amd64
cpu     HAMMER                  # aka K8, aka Opteron & Athlon64
nocpu   i486_CPU
ident   CUSTOM64
nomakeoption DEBUG

## No IPv6
nooptions       INET6
nooptions       SCTP            # Stream Control Transmission Protocol

## No Debugging stuff
nooptions INVARIANTS
nooptions INVARIANT_SUPPORT
nooptions WITNESS
nooptions WITNESS_SKIPSPIN

nodevice        eisa

nodevice        fdc

## Disable various ATA systems we will never have
nodevice        atapicd         # ATAPI CDROM drives
nodevice        atapifd         # ATAPI floppy drives
nodevice        atapist         # ATAPI tape drives

nooptions       MSDOSFS         # MSDOS Filesystem
nooptions       CD9660          # ISO 9660 Filesystem

device          ahci

nodevice        urio
nodevice        uscanner
nodevice        aue
nodevice        axe
nodevice        cdce
nodevice        cue
nodevice        kue
nodevice        rue

# PCMCIA and cardbus bridge support
nodevice        cbb             # cardbus (yenta) bridge
nodevice        pccard          # PC Card (16-bit) bus
nodevice        cardbus         # CardBus (32-bit) bus

# Parallel port
nodevice        ppc
nodevice        ppbus           # Parallel port bus (required)
nodevice        lpt             # Printer
nodevice        plip            # TCP/IP over parallel
nodevice        ppi             # Parallel port interface device

# FireWire support
nodevice        firewire        # FireWire bus code
nodevice        sbp             # SCSI over FireWire (Requires scbus and da)
nodevice        fwe             # Ethernet over FireWire (non-standard!)
nodevice        fwip            # IP over FireWire (RFC 2734,3146)
nodevice        dcons           # Dumb console driver
nodevice        dcons_crom      # Configuration ROM for dcons

For my own archives, I have reproduced installation instructions for SABnzbd and Sickbeard on FreeBSD from Syah of the FreeBSD forums (titled: FreeBSD +Sabnzbd/Sickbeard/CouchPotato):

1. install sabnzbd+ from ports.

# cd /usr/ports/news/sabnzbdplus; make install clean

2. install some dependencies if they are not already present on your system. Needed to run & acquire python scripts (Sick Beard, Couch Potato, Headphones)

Python # cd /usr/ports/lang/python; make install clean

Cheetah # cd /usr/ports/devel/py-cheetah; make install clean

Git # cd /usr/ports/devel/git; make install clean

3. Fetch most recent builds of the three tools

Sick Beard # cd /usr/local ; git clone git://github.com/midgetspy/Sick-Beard.git sickbeard

4. Configure auto-start for python scripts and sabnzbd+

Sick Beard # cp /usr/local/sickbeard/init.freebsd /usr/local/etc/rc.d/sickbeard

Add the following to /etc/rc.conf:
sabnzbd_enable="YES"
sickbeard_enable="YES"

5. configure all the tools to play nice together.

Totally beyond the scope of a quick & dirty update. You should read the installation instructions and refer to the individual websites for each of these projects to fully leverage this tool set.

Hopefully this gets you a bit further towards your goal.
To keep track of upstream changes to SickBeard:
# cd /usr/local/sickbeard && git pull

A few notes:

• Step 4. will fail as SickBeard currently only comes with an Ubuntu startup script. Hatchling, from the SickBeard Forums (A FreeBSD rc.d script), kindly published a working copy of a FreeBSD rc script that is available here (and duplicated here.)
  It appears that an init script for FreeBSD is now provided with the latest git pull - unfortunately, it’s not perfect, and needs to be modified for SickBeard to shut down properly.

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

  diff --git a/init.freebsd b/init.freebsd index 8d9ba4b..3f65b31 100755 --- a/init.freebsd +++ b/init.freebsd @@ -69,7 +69,7 @@ verify_sickbeard_pid() { sickbeard_stop() { echo "Stopping $name" verify_sickbeard_pid - ${WGET} -O - -q --user=${SBUSR} --password=${SBPWD} "http://${HOST}:${PORT}/home/shutdown/" >/dev/null + ${WGET} -O - -q --user=${SBUSR} --password=${SBPWD} "http://${HOST}:${PORT}/home/shutdown/?pid=${pid}" >/dev/null if [ -n "${pid}" ]; then wait_for_pids ${pid} echo "Stopped"

According to the official FreeBSD handbook (Ch 7.2 Browsers), perform the following steps to have a Java and Flash capable Chromium browser for FreeBSD 8:

As root:

# portmaster www/chromium \ java/openjdk6 \ java/icedtea-web \ www/nspluginwrapper \ www/linux-f10-flashplugin10

Then:

# mkdir -p /usr/local/share/chromium/plugins

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/IcedTeaPlugin.so /usr/local/share/chromium/plugins/

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/npapi/linux-f10-flashplugin/libflashplayer.so \ /usr/local/lib/browser_plugins/

The Linux process file system, linprocfs(5) has to be mounted on /compat/linux/proc:

# mount -t linprocfs linproc /compat/linux/proc

To mount the proc fs at each system boot, in /etc/fstab, have:

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linproc    /compat/linux/proc  linprocfs   rw  0   0

As a user:

% nspluginwrapper -v -a -i

Follow the official FreeBSD documents on how to install the latest nvidia drivers (Installing and using Compiz Fusion - Ch 2 Setting up the FreeBSD nVidia driver).

My /etc/X11/xorg.conf contains:

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# nvidia-settings: X configuration file generated by nvidia-settings
# nvidia-settings:  version 285.05.09  (root@localhost)  Fri Oct 10 23:03:46 EST 2011

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "X.org Configured"
    Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    Option         "Xinerama" "0"
EndSection

Section "Files"
    ModulePath      "/usr/local/lib/xorg/modules"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/misc/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/OTF"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/Type1/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/bitstream-vera/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/terminus-font/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/75dpi/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/100dpi/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/artwiz-fonts/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/dejavu/"
    FontPath        "/usr/local/lib/X11/fonts/webfonts/"
    FontPath        "/home/ootput/.fonts/ubuntu/"
EndSection

Section "Module"
    Load           "extmod"
    Load           "glx"
    Load           "dbe"
    Load           "dri"
    Load           "dri2"
    Load           "record"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5 6 7"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Acer GN245HQ"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 83.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Card0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "nVidia Corporation"
    BoardName      "GT218 [GeForce 8400 GS]"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8400GS"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "TwinView" "0"
    Option         "metamodes" "nvidia-auto-select +0+0; 1920x1080 +0+0"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

I completely missed the boat on this one, but apparently, ten months ago, Chyrp came back.

Provided the project persists and progresses, I might consider taking another look at the platform that I had once loved. In the meantime, I’ll stick with Habari - which I have grown accustomed to. I know that Chyrp is a very young product, but it’s sudden termination was simply too much to bear - I honestly can’t get my hopes up again.

Truth be told, I’m actually very pleased to hear that the product was restarted - it would have been a shame to have let such a promising piece of software go to waste. Even Chyrps website’s design was delicious:

I wish the team the best of luck with all of their endeavours.

(MetaSEO) adds search engine optimizations to the page head.

Habari’s plug-in doesn’t provide an option to configure web-robot caching. I created the following patch to address this:

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--- metaseo.plugin.php  2011-10-06 18:54:14.326378049 +0800
+++ metaseo.plugin.php-nocache   2011-10-06 18:53:37.566385150 +0800
@@ -69,10 +69,13 @@
         'home_keywords' => $home_keys,
         'home_index' => true,
         'home_follow' => true,
+        'home_cache' => false,
         'posts_index' => true,
         'posts_follow' => true,
+        'posts_cache' => true,
         'archives_index' => false,
         'archives_follow' => true,
+        'archives_cache' => false,
      );
   }

@@ -133,10 +136,13 @@
      $ui->append( 'fieldset', 'Robots', _t( 'Robots', 'metaseo' ) );
      $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'home_index', 'option:MetaSEO__home_index', _t( 'Index Home Page', 'metaseo' ) );
      $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'home_follow', 'option:MetaSEO__home_follow', _t( 'Follow Home Page Links', 'metaseo' )  );
+     $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'home_cache', 'option:MetaSEO__home_cache', _t( 'Cache Home Page', 'metaseo' )  );
      $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'posts_index', 'option:MetaSEO__posts_index', _t( 'Index Posts', 'metaseo' ) );
      $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'posts_follow', 'option:MetaSEO__posts_follow', _t( 'Follow Post Links', 'metaseo' ) );
+     $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'posts_cache', 'option:MetaSEO__posts_cache', _t( 'Cache Posts', 'metaseo' ) );
      $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'archives_index', 'option:MetaSEO__archives_index', _t( 'Index Archives', 'metaseo' ) );
      $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'archives_follow', 'option:MetaSEO__archives_follow', _t( 'Follow Archive Links', 'metaseo' ) );
+     $ui->Robots->append( 'checkbox', 'archives_cache', 'option:MetaSEO__archives_cache', _t( 'Cache Archives', 'metaseo' ) );

      $ui->append( 'submit', 'save', _t( 'Save', 'metaseo' ) );
      $ui->out();
@@ -381,6 +387,12 @@
               else {
                  $robots .= ', nofollow';
               }
+              if ( !Options::get( 'MetaSEO__posts_cache' ) ) {
+                 $robots .= ', noarchive';
+              }
               break;
            case 'display_home':
               if ( Options::get( 'MetaSEO__home_index' ) ) {
@@ -395,6 +407,12 @@
               else {
                  $robots .= ', nofollow';
               }
+              if ( !Options::get( 'MetaSEO__home_cache' ) ) {
+                 $robots .= ', noarchive';
+              }
               break;
            case 'display_entries_by_tag':
            case 'display_entries_by_date':
@@ -411,6 +429,12 @@
               else {
                  $robots .= ', nofollow';
               }
+              if ( !Options::get( 'MetaSEO__archives_cache' ) ) {
+                 $robots .= ', noarchive';
+              }
               break;
            default:
               $robots = 'noindex, follow';

You can encrypt your password for NickServ authentication using blowfish and SASL.

To set “dh-blowfish” by default for all servers:

/set irc.server_default.sasl_mechanism dh-blowfish

(Note that this will only work if your WeeChat was built with libgcrypt support - otherwise, use the “plain” mechanism.)

Additionally, per-server username and password settings can be applied - for instance, with Freenode:

/set irc.server.freenode.sasl_username "_username_" /set irc.server.freenode.sasl_password "_password_"

From FreeBSD Handbook - Ch 26 Updating FreeBSD:

Security patches are stored on a remote machine and may be downloaded and installed using the following command:

# freebsd-update fetch

# freebsd-update install

An entry in /etc/crontab allows freebsd-update to be run as a nightly cron job:

@daily root freebsd-update cron

Here, freebsd-update will only check if updates exist. If patches exist, they will automatically be downloaded to the local disk but not applied; the root user will be sent an email so they may install them manually.

If anything goes wrong, freebsd-update has the ability to roll back the last set of changes with the following command:

# freebsd-update rollback

Once complete, the system should be restarted if the kernel or any kernel modules were modified. This will allow FreeBSD to load the new binaries into memory.

The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for users and administrators to install applications. There are currently 22776 ports available.

To fetch the FreeBSD Ports tree for the first time, as root:

# portsnap fetch extract

Install portmaster to manage your ports without external databases or languages:

# cd /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portmaster

# make install clean

To list all outdated and installed packages from the FreeBSD Ports tree:

# pkg_version -l '>'

(Packages that appear on the left of the > sign are outdated, and may be updated from the sources provided online.)

/usr/ports/UPDATING describes various issues and additional steps users may encounter and need to perform when updating a port, including such things as file format changes, changes in locations of configuration files, or other such incompatibilities with previous versions.

# less /usr/ports/UPDATING

Then, to upgrade all packages/ports:

# portmaster -Da

To update your packages in the future:

# portsnap fetch update

# pkg_version -l '>'

# less /usr/ports/UPDATING

# portmaster -Da

portmaster can also remove stale distfiles with the --clean-distfiles option. To clear old distfiles for all ports and automatically confirm their deletion, use the -t and -y flags respectively, i.e.,:

# portmaster -t -y --clean-distfiles

I perform the following set of commands when a significant error gets introduced into the ports tree:

# portmaster -dys --clean-distfiles

# portmaster -vy --check-depends

Also, if I need to rebuild a specific port and all of its dependencies, I use:

# portmaster -fR www/firefox

WeeChat supports encrypted IRC connections using GnuTLS. For FreeBSD’s port of WeeChat, as root:

# cd /usr/ports/irc/weechat

# make

[select GnuTLS]

# make install

In WeeChat:

/set weechat.network.gnutls_ca_file "/usr/local/share/certs/ca-root-nss.crt"

/set irc.server.freenode.addresses "chat.freenode.net/7000"

/set irc.server.freenode.ssl on

/set irc.server.freenode.ssl_dhkey_size 1024

/connect freenode

NB: WeeChat’s support for GnuTLS is rather flaky, with numerous bug reports recently surfacing on the net (one such example). WeeChat’s FAQ suggests disabling verification of secure connections with:

/set irc.server.freenode.ssl_verify off