Add my latest post about FreeBSD and tweak the Makefile

Makefile

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+
 all:
-	jekyll && notify-send "Site rebuilt!"
+	LANG="en_US.UTF-8" jekyll build
 
 publish:
-	jekyll && notify-send "Site rebuilt and reindexed!"
+	jekyll build
 	rsync -acvz --delete _site/ clam:www.unethicalblogger.com/htdocs/
-	notify-send "Site deployed!"
 
 

_posts/2013-12-03-scratchiest-neckbeard-freebsd-x200.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: "The scratchiest neckbeard, or FreeBSD on my Thinkpad X200"
+tags:
+- freebsd
+- unix
+---
+
+
+Pulling my laptop out of my bag this past Friday, I was excited with the
+prospect of a good relaxing day of hacking on whatever I pleased. Having
+fulfilled the Thanksgiving family obligations, and negotiated an errand-free
+day with my wife, I was pretty excited about a full day of tinkering.
+
+I pop open my [Thinkpad](http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:X200), it wakes
+from sleep, and all input is frozen. The screen is rendering the image of my
+last desktop, but other than that, everything seems frozen, and a little
+indicator light is blinking at the base of the screen.
+
+"What the shit?" I think and hard reset the machine.
+
+The machine comes POSTs, displays a "disk error" on boot.
+
+"What the shit?"
+
+Experimenting a bit more, I determine that the SSD which I had purchased 3 1/2
+years ago, has completely failed. A situation I didn't expect from an SSD, I
+had only expected that writes might fail at some point.
+
+To make a long story short, I ventured out into the Black Friday chaos, fetched
+a new Intel 128GB SSD, brought it home and installed it.
+
+
+### Starting from scratch
+
+Over the past couple months I've been toying with the idea of installing
+FreeBSD on my laptop, but had been dissuaded by `lme@`'s report on the FreeBSD
+[Suspend/Resume](https://wiki.freebsd.org/SuspendResume) wiki page. Wherein he
+described his experience as *mostly* positive except:
+
+> *USB is dead after 2nd resume*
+
+Not having USB is somewhat of a deal breaker. Either way, I had some time to
+kill, a full OS to install *anyways*,  and it had been some time since `lme@`'s
+report. Perhaps the issue was fixed by now? Maybe it was just _his_ X200, mine
+might be different!
+
+I forged ahead.
+
+Installing FreeBSD is something I've probably done nearly 50 times in my, this
+time around was a little different however. The new FreeBSD 10 installer allows you to
+install ZFS as the "root" file system, not only that, you can enable encryption
+at install too!
+
+I went ahead and installed FreeBSD, giddy with the notion that I might
+*finally* have ZFS running on my main machine. Truth be told, I was more
+excited than any person probably should be about a file system.
+
+Completing the installation, I verified that suspend/resume worked _at all_. Sure
+enough, it did! Overjoyed I started setting up my environment to my liking.
+
+After 30 minutes of installing packages and configuring various bits of
+software, I remembered "*USB is dead after 2nd resume*"
+
+### Fixing Suspend/Resume
+
+As you might expect, the USB issue persisted. I started to experiment, and try
+to think of ways to fix the issue, all said and done I tried:
+
+ * Updated from BETA3 GENERIC to latest 10-stable (r258761) kernel
+ * Removed unnecessary modules from the kernel and rebuilt my own custom config
+ * Disabled "options VESA" in kernel, based on a reference made in a mailing
+   list post I've long since lost track of
+ * Set the sysctls `dev.[uoex]hci.*.wake` to `1`, based on [this post](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-usb/2013-July/012242.html)
+
+
+The last item **actually** solved the issue! I was able to use USB devices
+after multiple suspends! With further experimentation I determined that I was
+not able to leave USB peripherals connected if I wanted to suspend the machine.
+Leaving those devices connected would result in the machine suspending, and
+then immediately waking back up. A "quirk", but something I can cope with in
+exchange for ZFS and the other goodies that FreeBSD 10 provides.
+
+If you're unable to reproduce these results, you might want to compare your list of kernel modules with mine below. A buggy kernel module can affect suspend/resume in unpredictable ways, from my understand.
+
+> zfs.ko opensolaris.ko geom_eli.ko crypto.ko aesni.ko sem.ko iwn5000fw.ko
+> ums.ko ng_ubt.ko netgraph.ko ng_hci.ko ng_bluetooth.ko ulpt.ko ng_l2cap.ko
+> ng_btsocket.ko ng_socket.ko linux.ko i915.ko drm.ko
+
+Based on another mailing list post, I also set the sysctl
+`hw.acpi.lid_switch_state=S3` to make sure that the X200 would suspend when I
+shut the lid automatically.
+
+----
+
+Despite my low expectations originally, I had a managed to arrive at a FreeBSD machine which:
+
+ * Uses the entirety of the SSD as an entire "zpool" with various ZFS
+   partitions. This is double-plus-good as ZFS support in FreeBSD 10 supports TRIM thanks to [work by pjd@](http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-September/036777.html)
+ * Suspends on lid close/resumes on lid open correctly
+ * Restores all functionality after multiple suspend/resume cycles
+ * Utilizes the built in wireless connection properly
+ * Changes power consumption profile automatically when the power is detached
+   via `powerd`
+ * Plays audio correctly via the onboard audio card (not actually a requirement)
+
+
+All of this, in a 12 inch, 4lb laptop is pretty darn exciting.
+
+
+### Quirks
+
+As to be expected, there are some quirks, nothing serious, but quirky behaviors nonetheless:
+
+ * Aforementioned USB suspend/resume wake behavior
+ * After resume, if no USB devices are attached, it seems X.org doesn't
+   "understand" that the built-in keyboard is a valid input device. This *goes
+   away* by switching to another virtual terminal, and then *back* to X. In
+   effect, `Ctrl+Alt+F1` then `Ctrl+Alt+F9` to return to X, and input returns
+   normally.
+ * The default mode for the wireless (`iwn(4)`) driver seems to be "scan your
+   brains out", which if you're trying to save battery **or** you're out of
+   range of any useful wireless networks, is a little silly. This is easy to fix
+   just by "downing" the interface with `ifconfig wlan0 down`
+ * The wireless driver suffers from degraded performance when the laptop is in
+   areas of moderate to heavy channel congestion. I'm working with some
+   developers to hunt this issue down, the work-around right now is really just to
+   "be patient" :)
+
+
+### Future
+
+The main purpose of my laptop is to support my work as a developer, the
+secondary purpose is to support my work as an open source hacker. Having any
+*nix OS makes the first case feasible, but having FreeBSD unlocks some hacking
+that I've wanted to do, such as:
+
+
+ * Learning more about ZFS, including performing whole-disk back-ups via ZFS
+   snapshots and/or mirroring.
+ * Restarting my work with [launchd](https://wiki.freebsd.org/launchd) on top
+   of FreeBSD as a viable alternative to `rc.d`. (aside: systemd which many
+   Linux hackers are familiar with can be considered a poor implementation of
+   launchd, which is, in my opinion, a pretty stellar job management daemon)
+ * Start to particpate more in FreeBSD development, whether via patches to the
+   base system or various ports that I use.
+ * Experimenting with [Bhyve](http://bhyve.org/), a new BSD hypervisor
+   technology incorporated in FreeBSD 10.
+
+----
+
+The most unfortunate aspect of this development means that I'm probably stuck
+on my X200 for another couple years, or at least until somebody else does the
+foot work to make sure later generation Thinkpad's are covered by FreeBSD's
+sparse laptop support.
+
+
+I'm plenty satisfied with my work/play environment, all I need is to
+acquire a FreeBSD sticker for the X200 and I'm set!
+