Hi there ! I have a little box at home, hosting some little services for personal use under freebsd with a full disk encryption (geli). I’m never at home and long power outage often occurs so I always need to come back home to type my passphrase to decrypt the disk.

I was searching this week a solution to do it remotely and found the “poor-guy-kvm” solutions turning a Raspberry like board (beaglebone black in my case) in a hid keyboard. It works fine once the computer has booted but once reboot when the passphrase is asked before it loads the loader menu, nothing. When I plug an ordinary USB keyboard I can type my passphrase so USB module is loaded.

Am I missing something ? Am I trying something impossible ?

(I could’ve asked on freebsd forum but… Have to suscribe, presentation, etc… Long journey)

  • plague-sapiensEnglish
    2•1 year ago

    Your answer wasn’t rude at all :) and thanks for the long one! Looks like I should try FreeBSD again, last time I was just overwhelmed, but that’s many years ago. My last try was OPNsense which didn’t work like I wanted it to (stupid IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel, which didn’t properly reconnect after the 24h ISP disconnection and my script to fix this fucked up latency and gaming wasn’t possible because of stutters (probably packet loss too)). Security is the main aspect of my try to use it. Linux can be like a swiss cheese if misconfigured. Still better than Windows (Server) tho xD

    • Jean-Mich MuchOPEnglish
      1•1 year ago

      Yeah, not hard to do better than windows ! ;) I thought freebsd has many improvements each new versions so if your try was many years ago maybe you will find something interesting today… Or maybe not ;) It wasn’t possible to fix the latency because of people who suffered of speech disorder ?

      • plague-sapiensEnglish
        1•1 year ago

        What? xD The script used the DSL modems IPv6 WAN IP to set up the IPv6-to-IPv4 tunnel (to get IPv4 working) each time my ISP dropped the connection after 24h (standard DSL procedure over here in DE) or rnd reconnection. But somehow that script triggered a higher latency and probably packet loss/delay (couldn’t measure it, cause it only appeared in fast paced shooters like MW2019). Without the script everything ran fine except IPv4 after disconnections, which had to be setup manually. After that I sent the DSL modem back and returned to my AVM FritzBox as my main router. Can’t really say if it was directly the scripts fault or sth else in my OPNsense setup (low powered CPU, USB ethernet adapter, 4 port gbit LAN PCIe card, defective RAM, …). Maybe I’ll try a similar setup again some time, because I kinda liked OPNsense…

        • Jean-Mich MuchOPEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          You said

          gaming wasn’t possible because of stutters

          I searched what ‘stutters’ mean, I don’t know this word, and I’ve just found the definition of people who suffer of speech disorder :)

          I wouldn’t trust USB Ethernet adapter if latency is important to me but maybe I’m wrong it’s just superstition. I’ve just used one time OPNsense for the work and just for checking some network information but I remember saying it was a nice web ui haha

          • plague-sapiensEnglish
            2•1 year ago

            Ah, yeah stutters has different meanings. One being people with a speech disorder and the other one is usually used for display issues (like tearing). It felt like I was using a low refresh rate screen with really low fps, but had 144Hz and 144 fps xD

            USB can ramp up latency for sure, should be because of I/O overhead, which usually is ignorable when the HW is fast enough ime.

            Now my fingers are itchy to try FreeBSD and OPNsense again, haha. Like I haven’t already enough stuff to do and test…

            • Jean-Mich MuchOPEnglish
              1•1 year ago

              Oh okay , thanks for the definition !

              Haha sorry to wake up unreasonable curiosity to you ! :D