A Simple IPFW In-Kernel NAT Setup on FreeBSD

 Posted on December 25, 2019  |  3 minutes  |  451 words  |  Neel Chauhan

After graduating college, I am moving from Brooklyn, NY to Redmond, WA (guess where I got a job). I always wanted to re-do my OPNsense firewall (currently a HP T730) with stock FreeBSD and IPFW’s in-kernel NAT. Why IPFW? Benchmarks have shown IPFW to be faster which is especially good for my Tor relay, and because I can! However, one downside of IPFW is less documentation vs PF, even less without natd (which we’re not using), and this took me time to figure this out. [Read More]

OPNsense/pfSense on the HP T730: Use Broadcom NICs, not Intel

 Posted on November 21, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  348 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I recently picked up an HP T730 as my OPNsense firewall, mainly to repurpose my previous HP ProDesk as a desktop. With that, I also initially tried an Intel NIC primarily because the de-facto NIC choice for OPNsense/pfSense is in fact Intel. To my surprise, the T730 froze with the Intel-based NICs I tried, both igb and em based cards. Many people have reported on pfSense’s subreddit that certain Intel-based NICs actually do freeze on the T730. [Read More]

Installing GENI Tools/Omni on FreeBSD

 Posted on September 4, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  272 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I have been asked to use GENI to test some software I have written at CacheCash/NYU. To communicate with GENI, you usually use a tool called Omni. FreeBSD has been my choice of desktop operating system since 2012, and since I am using my personal machine, my work is being done on FreeBSD. However, Omni only supports Python 2 while FreeBSD’s default version of Python is Python 3. Not that a default of Python 3 is a bad thing (I think it’s a blessing), but some additional steps are needed to install run Omni in this case. [Read More]

Fixing the "Segmentation Fault" error when installing OPNsense on the HP T620 Plus

 Posted on July 5, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  242 words  |  Neel Chauhan

I have gotten a HP T620 Plus as a firewall box, replacing a Chinese “Mini PC” which barely handles my 300/300 Verizon FiOS. The T620 Plus is a very popular choice in the pfSense world, however I wanted to go with OPNsense. One issue with the T620 Plus with OPNsense is that when you attempt to install, you get a segmentation fault in the installer. From forum posts, many other people have had this issue with HP and non-HP hardware. [Read More]

FreeBSD (or Linux) doesn't boot on a HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10 when using "Smart Array SW RAID Support" in UEFI mode

 Posted on June 10, 2019  |  2 minutes  |  325 words  |  Neel Chauhan

Note: I am using FreeBSD as the operating system in the article, but the information should be generic to Linux or any non-Microsoft operating system. This should also apply to most other current HPE ProLiant servers (as of 2019) other than the MicroServer (UPDATE: Don’t own one, but this article should apply to the new MicroServer Gen10 Plus as well). I recently got a Xeon 4108 HPE ProLiant ML110 Gen10 to replace my MicroServer as a home server along with two 1TB hard drives to run in ZFS RAID. [Read More]

Automatic Switchover between Headphones and Speakers on FreeBSD with device.hints

 Posted on March 23, 2019  |  3 minutes  |  456 words  |  Neel Chauhan

If you’re like me and run FreeBSD on a laptop (mine is was a HP EliteBook x360 1030 G2 before I broke it in a bothed “repair” job), one issue you may encounter is the fact that switching between speakers and headphones isn’t automatic. This isn’t a HP-specific problem as I also know this impacts Dell laptops, and probably impacts other laptop brands as well. However, not all hope is lost. [Read More]