Host: thinkpadt480s | Date: 2026-05-17 | Status: DRM resolved, Plasma Wayland session pending

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Problem

After upgrading to FreeBSD 15.1-BETA3 and getting DRM 6.12 working see:freebsd-15.1-drm-i915-runbook.md, Plasma Wayland would not start through SDDM. Logging in via SDDM’s greeter bounced back to the login screen with no error output. wayland-session.log was empty. XFCE (X11) worked fine through SDDM.

Root Cause

Session activation failed in this configuration. ck-list-sessions showed:

$ ck-list-sessions | grep active
        active = FALSE

When a session is not marked active, kwin_wayland cannot acquire DRM device access : /dev/dri/* access fails, libseat/seatd integration may not work, and the Wayland compositor exits immediately, often with no log output. This matches the symptom exactly.

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Host: thinkpadt480s | Date: 2026-05-15 | Status: Deployed and running

battery-sleep.sh is a small cron script that suspends FreeBSD to RAM when the battery drops to a threshold (default 20%). It is a companion to the sysutils/battery-shutdown port — that script shuts down at critical levels (~5 minutes remaining); this one sleeps earlier so the battery is not drained while the machine sits unattended.

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Host: thinkpadt480s | Date: 2026-05-10 | Status: Deployed and running

blight is a backlight idle ‘daemon’ I made to use on KDE Plasma/Wayland on FreeBSD 15 because I needed something to dim the screen. It blanks the screen after a configurable idle timeout, suspends on battery after extended idle, and restores brightness on any input activity : no D-Bus, no logind, no powerdevil, no device polling. It is a shell script wrapping swayidle, which speaks the org_kde_kwin_idle Wayland protocol directly to KWin.

This is a rewrite. The original was a Python daemon that polled input devices directly. That approach had fundamental problems on FreeBSD and was replaced entirely with a sh wrapper around swayidle.

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Summary

On 2026-04-06 at approximately 09:38 EDT, the Kea DHCP service on pfSense (26.03-RELEASE) stopped serving leases on all interfaces. The root cause was a corruption of the <dhcpd> block in /cf/conf/config.xml, which caused pfSense to generate an empty Kea interfaces list. Service was restored by activating a previous ZFS boot environment.

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Timeline

Time (EDT)	Event
08:54	config.xml drops ~15KB — <dhcpd> block wiped (config-1775480086.xml > config-1775480087.xml)
08:54–09:37	Multiple config saves at reduced size; pfSense regenerates Kea config with empty interfaces each time
09:38	Kea begins logging DHCPSRV_NO_SOCKETS_OPEN; DHCP stops serving leases
09:38–09:41	Kea restarts repeatedly, fails each time
~09:45	Operator detects outage; accesses box via WireGuard VPN
~10:00	Investigation begins
~10:30	Root cause identified: empty <dhcpd> in config.xml
~10:45	Config restore from backup attempted; Kea config generator continues producing empty interfaces
~11:00	ZFS boot environment rollback to default_20260405014509 initiated
~11:10	Service restored

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Root Cause

A pfSense package operation (pfBlockerNG or Suricata reload/apply) triggered a config write at 08:54 that silently cleared the entire <dhcpd> section from /cf/conf/config.xml. This is a pfSense 26.x bug: package-initiated config saves can clobber unrelated service configuration blocks.

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Overview

This is the build-and-break log for bringing a previously unstable TrueNAS/FreeBSD box back to a usable state after months of ugly crash behavior under VM load.

The short version:

• Salvaged hardware repurposed as a NAS
• A Fedora VM running Plex-related work could trigger a reboot loop
• Early on, the machine was already rebooting itself in a loop — even before the NVMe path failure showed up clearly in logs
• Hard evidence eventually pointed at one NVMe path (nvme2 / nda2) timing out and detaching under load
• Reseating the suspect SN770 and replacing its heatsink brought the mirror back online
• Current best hypothesis: physical seating, thermal contact, or mechanical instability — not a software bug

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(Mac Pro 2013 / Non-Secure Enclave Macs)

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⚠️ Scope

This guide applies only to pre-T2 Macs (e.g., Mac Pro Late 2013).

These machines:

• Do NOT have a T2 chip
• Do NOT enforce hardware Activation Lock
• Store iCloud / Find My bindings in macOS user & system databases

This will remove the local iCloud association without deleting the Apple ID account itself.

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🧠 Understanding the Architecture

On pre-T2 Macs:

• iCloud login state is stored locally in user databases
• Find My relies on account tokens
• There is no firmware-level enforcement

Removing the local databases clears the association from macOS.

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ISSUE

Every good storage failure starts innocently.

Plug in a brand-new Samsung T7.
Select it in Time Machine.
Click “Use Disk.”
Allow macOS to format the drive automatically.
Let the backup run. It may even complete once — maybe even a few more times.
Then it fails with a generic error:
“An error occurred while preparing the backup.”

Time Machine consistently failed during the “Preparing backup” phase on macOS 26.3 (Tahoe).

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Overview

This document is the exact build log for bringing up a production-grade Nextcloud instance inside a Bastille jail on TrashProBSD (FreeBSD 14.3-RELEASE) using:

• nginx
• php-fpm (PHP 8.2)
• PostgreSQL 17
• Redis
• APCu

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