Beastie says 'hello world'?

Hey there!

Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, there was..

It has been a long time since I wrote a BSD blog, specifically FreeBSD, but it was under nearly the same name.  Long ago in this galaxy, on Earth, there was an OS called PC-BSD.  I came to it from Windows because of a weird motherboard hiccup which invalidated the onboard ethernet.  I have no idea whether it was a hardware malfunction or what but suddenly I had no ethernet.  I had an old 10/100/1000 ethernet card (I think it was 3com) which I believed should work, so I installed it and booted up.

Windows pretended the card was not there, so I tried for a short while to get it to work with my Windows 7.  When it became obvious that I couldn't manage that, I knew I would find a solution from open source.  I'm uncertain how I stumbled across PC-BSD, but it seemed like something that would be easier and a reasonable GUIfied experience.  I had used FreeBSD 2.2.6 in the distant past, so it was a return to something I knew --though I didn't know how substantially different that was from the version PC-BSD based itself upon.

Not too long after getting PC-BSD working on my box and having used version 8.0 for a while, I was asked to be involved with their forum site.  I had also been doing some work with the documentation wiki so I was okay with other efforts to help the project.  I ended up an admin and moderator there, created a decent theme to improve the layout and appearance of the site.  While PC-BSD was an active project, there was a sort of side site which allowed me to create a blog there.  That blog had almost the same name as this one, sadly all the content has gone but that is fine as much of it would be woefully out of date now.  PC-BSD has since ended, I've become active as admin and mod for the FreeNAS forums, now iX Community.  Near the end of PC-BSD, I chose to switch to FreeBSD, the stable branch, and have been using it ever since.

Perhaps you know me from FreeNAS, or PC-BSD, or twitter, or maybe you've encountered a bug report I've submitted.  Maybe you met me at a BBS get together, or a local ISP "wump", or we chatted on any number of BBSes that were so very cool in the early days of the internet.  I chose this nick long ago.  I have another blog which has languished a bit.

Here I am writing about FreeBSD, my experiences and troubles, solutions and tips, and the occasional rant.  If I have discovered something cool, or new, even if it is not directly related to FreeBSD but is usable from it, I'll post about it here.  This is going to be technical at times but I hope to offer as clear and precise directions as I can when appropriate.  I welcome comments, requests, and opinions.  I intend to label these posts in a suitable way so that it should be easier to find things later, so that this blog can be a resource in the years to follow.