Raspberry Pi router with FreeBSD

Modified: 01/01/2000 10:00

Created: 01/01/2000 10:00

[TOC]

This project is a result of an urge to relearn FreeBSD, as it is quite some time since I still used it. Also, I had spear Raspberry Pi and decided that using a laptop as a router for three people is kind of overkill.

I will in this post used the first Raspberry Pi model B, the one with 256mb ram.

Download FreeBSD

In this post, I have used FreeBSD 10.1

You can get the Raspberry Pi version from here

Creating the SD card

I mainly use OS X, so the few commands needed to create the SD card are specific. The dd command can probably be used the same way on Linux.

List disks:

diskutil list

Unmount the SD card:

diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX

Write the image to the SD card:

sudo dd bs=1m if=FreeBSD-10.1-RELEASE-arm-armv6-RPI-B.img of=/dev/diskX

In case of cached writes, force OS X to sync all writes to disk:

sync

Eject the disk:

diskutil eject /dev/diskX

Bootstrapping FreeBSD

The first time the Pi boots up, it will not have anything set. Login will be root, with no password.

Set password:

passwd

The date will also be very wrong, probably from when the image was created, so change that to:

date yymmddhhmm

Then download the ports collection so we can build packages:

portsnap fetch
portsnap extract

This is going to take a long time, so you should probably set it up over night. This also goes for the things we are going to compile.