ZFS combines the roles of volume manager and independent file system into one, giving multiple advantages over a stand-alone file system. It is renowned for speed, flexibility, and, most importantly, taking great care to prevent data loss. While many traditional file systems had to exist on a single disk at a time, ZFS is aware of the underlying structure of the disks and creates a pool of available storage, even on multiple disks. The existing file system will grow automatically when extra disks are added to the pool, immediately becoming available to the file system.

FreeBSD can mount ZFS pools and datasets during system initialization. To enable it, add this line to /etc/rc.conf:

Then start the service:

Before setting up ZFS, identify the device names of the disk associated with the system. A quick way of doing this is with:

The output should identify the device names, examples throughout the rest of this guide will use the default SCSI names: da0, da1, and da2. If the hardware differs, make sure to use the correct device names instead.

To create a simple, non-redundant pool using a single disk device:

To create files for users to browse within the pool:

The new file can be viewed using ls:

We can already start using more advanced ZFS features and properties. To create a dataset within the pool with compression enabled:

The example/compressed dataset is now a ZFS compressed file system.

Disable compression with:

To unmount a file system, use zfs umount and then verify with df:

Verify that example/compressed is not included as a mounted file under the output.

The file system can be re-mounted with zfs:

With the file system mounted, the output should include a line similar to the one below:

ZFS datasets are created just like any other file system, the following example creates a new file system called data:

Use df to see the data and space usage (some of the output has been removed for clarity)

Because these file systems are built on ZFS, they draw from the same pool for storage. This eliminates the need for volumes and partitions that other file systems rely on.

To destroy the file systems and then the pool that is no longer needed:

RAID-Z pools require three or more disks but offer protection from data loss if a disk were to fail. Because the ZFS pools can use multiple disks, support for RAID is inherent in the design of the file system

To create a RAID-Z pool, specifying the disks to add to the pool:

With the zpool created, a new file system can be made in that pool:

Enable compression and store an extra copy of directories and files:

A RAID-Z pool is a great place to store crucial system files, such as the home directory for users. To make the file system the home new home directory :

File system snapshots can be created to roll back to later, the snapshot name is marked in red and can be whatever you want:

ZFS creates snapshots of a dataset, allowing users to back up a file system for roll backs or data recovery in the future.

To list all available snapshots, zfs list can be used:

Every software RAID has a method of monitoring its state. View the status of RAID-Z devices using:

If all pools are Online and everything is normal, the message shows:

If there is a problem, perhaps a disk being in the Offline state, the pool state will look like this:

“OFFLINE” shows the administrator took da1 offline using:

Power down the computer now and replace da1. Power up the computer and return da1 to the pool:

Next, check the status again, this time without -x to display all pools:

ZFS uses checksums to verify the integrity of stored data, these data checksums can be verified (which is called scrubbing) to ensure integrity of the storage pool:

Only one scrub can be run at a time due to the heavy input/output requirements. The length of the scrub depends on how much data is store in the pool.After scrubbing completes, view the status with zpool status:

Displaying the completion date of the last scrubbing helps decide when to start another. Routine scrubs help protect data from silent corruption and ensure the integrity of the pool.

ZFS has two main utilities for administration: The zpool utility controls the operation of the pool and allows adding, removing, replacing, and managing disks. The zfs utility allows creating, destroying, and managing datasets, both file systems and volumes.

While this introductory guide won’t cover ZFS administration, you can refer to zfs(8) and zpool(8) for other ZFS options.

In this guide, we’ll use the xine video player to set up basic video playback on a fresh FreeBSD install. The xine multimedia player relies on the XWindow system and the XVideo extension to provide a graphical video playback interface.

Xorg supports a wide variety of video cards, but not all are supported or offer good video playback performance.

It is a good idea to have a short MPEG test file for evaluating various players and options. Since some DVD applications look for DVD media in /dev/dvd by default, or have this device name hardcoded in them, it might be useful to make a symbolic link to the proper device:

Due to the nature of devfs(5), manually created links will not persist after a system reboot. In order to recreate the symbolic link automatically when the system boots, add the following line to /etc/devfs.conf:

There are several possible ways to display video under Xorg and what works is largely hardware dependent. This guide will focus on the Xvideo extension which allows video to be directly displayed, even on low-end machines.

Start by installing the X Window System:

Once the package has been fully installed, the X Window System can be started with:

To check whether the Xvideo extension is running, use xvinfo:

If XVideo is supported, the result will look similar to the example below and may include screen and video card information.

XVideo is likely unsupported by the video card if the result instead look like:

The display may be unable to meet the demands of rendering video playback if XVideo is unsupported (though this is not always the case).

xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, BluRays and VCDs. It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet. Get started by installing the package:

In practice, xine requires either a fast CPU or support for the XVideo extension. The xine video player performs best on XVideo interfaces. If in the previous step, the Xvideo extension was unsupported, issues may occur.

The xine player starts a graphical user interface (GUI) and the menus can be used to navigate to multimedia files.

Alternatively, xine may be directly invoked from the command line by specifying the name of the file to play:

You now have a simple way to play a variety of multimedia files on your FreeBSD system! To find out more about the xine player, refer to the SourceForge page.

Updated: May 20, 2021

A collection of FreeBSD desktop distributions that have taken the FreeBSD operating system in a new direction while still relying on the incredibly powerful and stable base operating system of FreeBSD. From integrated desktop environments, portable USB-based systems, to data recovery tools, FreeBSD has been used by a wide variety of open-source projects. This page hopes to highlight just a few of these projects:

Project Website

“MidnightBSD is a BSD-derived operating system developed with desktop users in mind. It includes all the software you’d expect for your daily tasks — email, web browsing, word processing, gaming, and much more.”

Project Website

“GhostBSD is a simple, user-friendly operating system, based on the legendary security and stability of the FreeBSD operating system. GhostBSD provides all the benefits of the FreeBSD operating system combined with a focus on simplicity for newcomers.”

Project Website

“NomadBSD is a persistent live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery, for educational purposes, or to test FreeBSD’s hardware compatibility.”

Project Website

“hello (also known as helloSystem) is a desktop system for creators with a focus on simplicity, elegance, and usability. Its design follows the “Less, but better” philosophy. It is intended as a system for “mere mortals”, welcoming to switchers from the Mac. FreeBSD is used as the core operating system.”

Follow the link here for part 1

Updated: August 14, 2020

Packages can be downloaded in bulk by adding them to the same command line. Try this by installing the GNOME desktop environment, sudo, the vim editor, and Firefox in one line:

$ pkg install -y gnome3 vim-console firefox

The -y flag in the previous command assumes a pre-confirmation to the installation process, so installation will start instantly.

Gnome requires /proc to be mounted, in order to do this, run

$ vim /etc/fstab

This time we use the vim editor, Vi iMproved, and to begin typing you need to be in “insert mode” and must press ‘i‘ to enter insert mode and begin typing in text. Type in the following one-line configuration:

proc      /proc      procfs      rw      0      0

Exit vim by pressing “Esc” on the keyboard, then type ZZ or :wq followed by Enter/Return. At this point the virtual machine desktop can be started with the following command:

Change to regular user by holding down “control” and pressing “d” on the keyboard which will log out the current user.  Log in again, this time as the regular user account that was created and type the following commands.

$ echo "exec /usr/local/bin/gnome-session" > ~/.xinitrc

$ startx

Here is how to open a local copy of the handbook we installed in the Final Configuration:

Right click on: Desktop > Applications > Firefox Web Browser

Open Firefox and navigate to the following URL: file:///usr/local/share/doc/freebsd/handbook/index.html

This is a local copy of the FreeBSD Handbook, and it will always be available as it doesn’t require an active internet connection. That’s all it takes to install FreeBSD. The next recommended step is to choose a firewall and configure it. Also recommend you pick up a copy of the book “BSD Hacks” to get more familiar with the tcsh shell as well as to acquire several new skills.

Navigate back to Applications and open the terminal.

In the open terminal, run:

$ sudo -i

$ env PAGER=cat freebsd-update fetch install

We’re using env PAGER=cat to modify the value of the PAGER variable which is used by the freebsd-update shell script. If you open up the shell script you will see the default value of PAGER is set to less. You can find the location of the freebsd-update shell script by typing which freebsd-update. By setting the value of PAGER to cat, freebsd-update will not stop to display the list of file to be updated, instead the cat command will only display the list of files and won’t stop to wait for you to read. If you only type freebsd-update fetch install, you’ll need to use the following to get through the prompts

‘Page Down‘ & ‘q‘ should get you through the prompts. If the screen shows END press ‘q‘, use ‘Page Down‘ for the other screens. You can also use ‘q’ for every screen.

Now that FreeBSD itself is up to date, we should also update the packages.

$ pkg update

$ pkg upgrade -y

Set UTF-8 as the locale for this host:

$ vim /etc/login.conf

Change the line with :umask=022: to look like the following:

:umask=022:\ :charset=UTF-8:\ :lang=en_US.UTF-8:

Save and quit the editor then run the following:

$ cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf

$ logout

Log in as root and type the following to verify UTF-8 locale has been set

$ locale

Install iocage

$ pkg install -y py37-iocage

The following command assumes your zpool is named zroot adjust as necessary. Type zpool status to see the current name of your zpool.

$ iocage activate zroot

$ iocage list

We should now see an empty table as the output of iocage list, we’ll do some additional housekeeping below to improve performance of iocage. There are many things you can do to optimize performance of various applications. One way to learn several new tips and tricks is to read the supurb collection of FreeBSD Mastery books available at https://MWL.io (In fact, the following performance optimization trick was in the book FreeBSD Mastery: Jails)

$ mount -t fdescfs null /dev/fd

$ vi /etc/fstab

Add the following line to the file and exit when finished. ‘i‘ for insert mode, ‘ESC‘ then ‘ZZ‘ to save and quit the file. Press ‘TAB‘ between each of the fields for the fstab file rather than using spaces to separate fields.

fdescfs /dev/fd fdescfs rw 0 0

Download a Release branch of FreeBSD first

$ iocage fetch

We used [Enter] to fetch the default release iocage wants to provide. Verify the download with the following command

$ iocage list -r

View the help documentation

$ iocage --help

Any sub-commands can also have the –help flag appended

$ iocage create --help

Create a base jail

$ iocage create -T -n JAILNAME ip4_addr="10.0.2.16" -r 12.1-RELEASE

List current jails

$ iocage list

Startup jail-one and jump into the console

$ iocage console JAILNAME

The console command will start the jail if it isn’t already started. To manually start a jail use this:

$ iocage start JAILNAME

Similarly to stop a jail issue

$ iocage stop JAILNAME

Verify networking is working

$ pkg

Say yes to the pkg bootstrap prompt. Exit the jail console with ctrl + d.

To delete a jail:

$ iocage destroy JAILNAME

The following commands will work on the virtual machine we’ve been using so far, but it will take a long time to compile all the packages.

We’re going to use the cloned virtual machine we created earlier to explore Poudriere.

Start up the cloned VM.

Execute the following commands as the root user:

$ pkg install -y poudriere vim-console

$ mkdir /usr/ports/distfiles

$ mkdir /usr/local/poudriere

$ vim /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf

poudriere.conf content to modify

ZPOOL=zroot FREEBSD_HOST=https://download.freebsd.org

Continue executing:

$ poudriere jail -c -j amd64-12-1 -v 12.1-RELEASE

$ poudriere jail -l

$ poudriere ports -cp head

$ poudriere ports -l

Get together a list of packages to build. I ran pkg query -e '%a=0' %o on my laptop and a large list appeared. pkg query on my VM was much shorter. To learn more about pkg query issue the command pkg help query to see help text for the query subcommand. Most commands support some form of help (-h, –help, or simply reading the man page with man PROGRAM) For this tutorial we will just build a shorter list of packages. The command to export the current packages installed on the system to a file called pkglist is:

$ pkg query -e ‘%a=0’ %o | tee pkglist

$ editors/vim-console

$ ports-mgmt/pkg

$ ports-mgmt/poudriere

Note: tee writes output to a file and also to stdout. Also the following two bits of information are optional for this tutorial and are included to show you how to customize packages.

Two ways to configure custom options for packages, manually and with the normal make config screen. FYI: Manually looks like this:

$ vim /usr/local/etc/poudriere.d/amd64-12-1-make.conf

$ DEFAULT_VERSIONS += ssl=libressl

To customize a package one can use the normal package configuration screens, which will appear when issuing the following command

$ poudriere options -j amd64-12-1 -p head -f pkglist

For this tutorial we’ll just actually build the packages with the default options to get the hang of Poudriere by issuing the following:

$ poudriere bulk -j amd64-12-1 -p head -f pkglist

$ cd /usr/local/poudriere

This directory contains logs related to Poudriere builds. There are even a few different website files generated at /data/logs/bulk/.html/ with information about the builds. You can open the website in Firefox using the URL file:///data/logs/bulk/.html/index.html to check on the status of a current Poudriere build. You can also press ctrl + t on the command line where you issued the poudriere bulk command to issue a SIGINFO to Poudriere which is configured to print out the current status of the Poudriere build while the command is still processing. This trick works on many other commands as well to show you the status. For instance if you were using scp to download a large file and wanted to see how far along the download was SIGINFO would print out the status on the command line to show you. Another example is if you were decompressing a zip file and wanted to know the status of the extraction process.

Once Poudriere has finished, the packages that were built are available at

$ /data/packages/amd64-12-1-head

Create a pkg repository

$ mkdir -p /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos

Disable the main FreeBSD repo by creating a file to override the default settings found in the default FreeBSD repository file /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf

$ vim /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf

Type in the following configuration with enabled set to no

FreeBSD: {
        enabled: no
}

Create a new configuration file for your local Poudriere package repository similar to the FreeBSD.conf file to hold the repository configuration

$ vim /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/amd64-12-1.conf

Add the following configuration

amd64-12-1: {
        url: “file:///data/packages/amd64-12-1-head”,
        enabled: yes,
}

To reinstall all packages using the new repo

$ pkg upgrade -fy

NOTE: A good Systems Administration practice is to add comments to your configs to let the future you know what the config options do and why there were put there in the first place. That way when you revisit a config file after some time, you’ll have some context as to why those options were chosen.

$ vim /usr/local/etc/poudriere.conf

# by default Poudriere builds all packages in the pkglist by default, these two lines tell Poudriere to look at each package individually

CHECK_CHANGED_OPTIONS=verbose CHECK_CHANGED_DEPS=yes

$ poudriere jail -j amd64-12-1 -u

$ poudriere ports -p head -u

$ poudriere bulk -j amd64-12-1 -p head -f pkglist

You can now install the updated packages:

$ pkg update

Avoiding Issues

Terminate current command:

$ ^C (Ctrl-C)

Clear to start of line:

$ ^U (Ctrl-U)

Finding Information:

Manual page for the “cmd” command, replace with any other command to access its manual page:

$ man cmd

Rebooting / Shutting Down

Power Down:

$ sudo shutdown –p now

Reboot:

$ sudo shutdown –r now

Log Out:

$ exit

$ logout

Directory Navigation

Display present work directory:

$ pwd

List contents of current directory:

$ ls

Files

Create file if it does not exist:

$ touch filename

Delete file:

$ rm filename

Rename a file:

$ mv oldname newname

Search for a file: (full filename is not needed)

$ locate filename

File editing

$ vi filename

$ ee filename

Change to your home directory

$ cd

$ cd ~

Change to parent directory

$ cd ..

Change to previous directory

$ cd -

Website: www.freebsd.org

FreeBSD Foundation: archive.freebsdfoundation.org

GitHub: github.com/freebsd  

Mailing Lists: https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo

Forums: https://forums.freebsd.org

FreeBSD Handbook: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/

Updated: June 15, 2022

Start by opening up the terminal, found under Applications > Utilities > Terminal. Then use the code:

sysctl -n machdep.cpu.brand_string

This will return a string identifying the computer’s processor. Running a web search for this processor will take you to the manufacturers website, which should list the processor’s stats as well as whether it is 32-bit or 64-bit.

Navigate to “Control Panel → System and Security → System” and look for the highlighted information to determine whether your system is 32-bit or 64-bit.

Visit the VirtualBox downloads website, and in the highlighted area, select the platform package binary that applies to your operating system. VirtualBox is available on Windows, macOS, Linux, and Solaris.

Opening the downloaded file will start the installation walkthrough. Once it finishes, you’ll be able to launch the application.

Visit the official FreeBSD releases page. The disk images are listed in order of release date, so the most recent release can be found at the top of the page as highlighted.

After clicking the link, you will be redirected to a file directory containing multiple formats and versions of the FreeBSD installer.

For Virtual Machines, the format you are looking for is the file ending in -disk.iso as shown above. Click this file and it will start downloading the installer.

Once the FreeBSD installer has been downloaded in the last step, run VirtualBox to start hard disk configuration. Select the “New” button on the top left of the window to open the configuration window. 

Name your operating system as “FreeBSD”, then select FreeBSD from the dropdown menu as well as the version (32 or 64 bit).

Choose the defaults options for disc setup until you reach the memory allocation section

After the hard disk has been configured, boot up the operating system with the “Start” button. VirtualBox will start up a virtual machine and ask for a virtual optical disk file. This will be the .iso file that you downloaded through the FreeBSD website. Navigate to this file by clicking the small file symbol next to the drop-down menu. Once selected, the booting process will continue and the FreeBSD installer will start.

The FreeBSD booting system will automatically start once VirtualBox starts the virtual machine. While this how-to will provide a detailed installation guide, the FreeBSD handbook’s installation guide can also be used. When in doubt, use the default options provided, as they can be reconfigured later if necessary.

While the FreeBSD installation process has been completed, there a few more configuration options that need to be set before booting into the newly installed system.

Once FreeBSD has been properly configured, a window will appear asking to reboot. Select “yes” and wait until the FreeBSD booting page appears again. Once this happens, manually close the virtual machine window and select “Power off the machine”.

On the main VirtualBox application, click the the section (on the lower right side of the window) that says “Storage”. A new window should appear showing the storage options.

Under the main “Controller: IDE” there will be two options. One will be the hard disk that VirtualBox created for the system (it will have a square blue hard drive icon) and the other is the original FreeBSD download (with a light blue disk icon). Right click the sub-storage with the disk icon and select “Remove” from the drop-down menu.

Once it is removed, the window should resemble the one pictured above.

Use the Snapshots menu in VirtualBox to Clone the VM. Check the box “Reinitialize the MAC address of all network cards”. We could choose either a Full clone or a Linked clone. We’ll use the Full clone option. Later on in the installfest we’ll use this cloned VM.

Click “Start” with the original VM selected, and the FreeBSD virtual machine should now boot in its configured form. In order to download packages you need to be logged into, or emulate the root user. After logging into the previously created user, enter the following command in the terminal:

$ su

Install the VirtualBox guest addition packages, and configure the startup service configuration:

$ pkg install emulators/virtualbox-ose-additions

$ sysrc vboxguest_enable=YES

$ sysrc vboxservice_enable=YES

sysrc is a pre-packaged command that allows rc.conf (system configuration to be read on boot) to be edited from the command line, without using a text editor.

Before installing a desktop environment, a graphical user interface (GUI) is needed. The X Window System is an open source GUI that supports FreeBSD and offers a ton of customization and user tools.

To install the Xorg binary package and configure the X Window System:

$ pkg install -y xorg

$ ee /boot/loader.conf

ee(1) is the first text editor we will be using, the following line can be added simply by typing it:

kern.vty=vt

Escape and then hit Enter twice to save changes and exit the ee(1) editor:

$ ee /usr/local/etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/driver-vboxvideo.conf

Use the same method above and add the following content to the new file:

Section “Device”

        Identifier "Card0"

        Driver "vboxvideo"

EndSection

Enter the following commands:

$ sysrc dbus_enable=YES

$ sysrc hald_enable=YES

$ dbus-uuidgen > /etc/machine-id

$ pkg install -y sudo

$ visudo

(we will use another text editor, the vi editor, to edit sudo )

Within the sudo config type /wheel press Enter and uncomment the line below to allow all members of the wheel group to use sudo (in vi you can type the following to accomplish this task: j0xxZZ) ( pressing j moves down, 0 moves to the beginning of a line, x deletes one character, ZZ is saves and quits)

$ reboot

Follow the link here

The next part will include installing a desktop environment, updating FreeBSD, setting up a FreeBSD jail, as well as using Ansible and Poudriere.

A wireless networking card is required to use a wireless network, FreeBSD will also need to be configured to the correct wireless network support. The correct module will need to be modified, depending on the type of networking card. The most commonly used wireless devices are those that use parts made by Atheros. These devices are supported by ath(4) and require the following line to be added to /boot/loader.conf:

If unsure about the device, you can identify many common wireless adaptors through the use of the  sysctl(8) net.wlan.devices variable:

To load support for a different type of wireless device, specify the module for that device. This example is for devices based on the Intersil Prism parts (wi(4)) driver:

Note: A list of available wireless drivers and supported adapters can be found in the FreeBSD Hardware Notes, available on the Release Information page of the FreeBSD website.

In addition, the modules that implement cryptographic support for the security protocols to use must be loaded. These are intended to be dynamically loaded on demand by the wlan(4) module. To load these modules at boot time, add the following lines to /boot/loader.conf:

Information about the wireless device should appear in the boot messages, like this:

Directly connecting to an unsecure network, while not recommended, is extremely common. It’s also a very simple process on FreeBSD. In this example I’ll beconnecting to the John F Kennedy International Airport’s free WiFi.

Start by finding the name of the network:

This will look for available networks and return a list, In this case, we want to connect to the JFK free wifi so we’ll use:

Hopefully you will see that it’s joined, and running ifconfig ath0 will show that it’s associated. You can then get an address with:

Most home/private networks will rely on these security protocols. Connecting a computer to an existing WPA/WPA2/Personal wireless network is a very common situation.

FreeBSD can act as an Access Point (AP) in order to act as a gateway or to eliminate the need to purchase AP hardware. Before an Access Point can be set up, the kernel must be configured with the appropriate networking support for the wireless card as well as the security protocols being used. This mode is only supported by native FreeBSD wireless drivers.

After setting up wireless networking, you can check if the device supports host-based access point mode:

This output displays the card’s capabilities. The HOSTAP word confirms that this wireless card can act as an AP.

The wireless device can only be put into hostap mode during the creation of the network pseudo-device, so a previously created device must be destroyed first:

then regenerated with the correct option before setting the other parameters:

Use ifconfig(8) again to see the status of the wlan0 interface:

The hostap parameter indicates the interface is running in the host-based access point mode.

The interface configuration can be done automatically at boot time by adding the following lines to /etc/rc.conf:

Once the AP is configured, initiate a scan from another wireless machine to find the AP.

Many cellphones can share data connection over USB, FreeBSD provides support through a variety of protocols:

Before attaching a device, load the appropriate driver into the kernel:

Once the device is attached ue0 will be available for use like a normal network device. Be sure that the “USB tethering” option is enabled on the mobile device.

To make this change permanent and load the driver as a module at boot time, place the appropriate line of the following in /boot/loader.conf:

Before attaching a Bluetooth device, determine which Bluetooth driver it uses. A broad variety of Bluetooth USB dongles are supported by ng_ubt(4). Broadcom BCM2033 based Bluetooth devices are supported by the ubtbcmfw(4) and ng_ubt(4) drivers. The 3Com Bluetooth PC Card 3CRWB60-A is supported by the ng_bt3c(4) driver. Serial and UART based Bluetooth devices are supported by sio(4), ng_h4(4), and hcseriald(8). For example, if the device uses the ng_ubt(4) driver:

If the Bluetooth device will be attached to the system during system startup, the system can be configured to load the module at boot time by adding the driver to /boot/loader.conf:

Once the driver is loaded, plug in the USB dongle. If the driver load was successful, output similar to the following should appear on the console and in /var/log/messages:

To start and stop Bluetooth, use the driver’s startup script.

FreeBSD uses hccontrol(8) to find and identify Bluetooth devices within RF proximity.

One of the most common tasks is discovery of Bluetooth devices within RF proximity. This operation is called inquiry. Inquiry and other HCI related operations are done using hccontrol(8). To display a list of devices that are in range use:

Note: only devices that are set to discoverable mode will be listed.

The BD_ADDR is the unique address of a Bluetooth device, similar to the MAC address of a network card. This address is needed for further communication with a device. To to obtain the human readable name that was assigned to the remote device:

The Bluetooth system provides a point-to-point connection between two Bluetooth units, or a point-to-multipoint connection which is shared among several Bluetooth devices. The following example shows how to create a connection to a remote device:

create_connection accepts BT_ADDR as well as host aliases in /etc/bluetooth/hosts.

The following example shows how to obtain the list of active baseband connections for the local device:

While a Bluetooth device can choose to require authentication, communication is normally not authenticated, so any Bluetooth device can talk to any other device. If the device requires authentication, the PIN code must be entered on both devices, the devices will then generate a link key. After that, the link key can be stored either in the devices or in a persistent storage. This procedure is called pairing.

The hcsecd(8) daemon is responsible for handling Bluetooth authentication requests. The default configuration file is /etc/bluetooth/hcsecd.conf. An example section for a cellular phone with the PIN code set to 1234 is shown below:

The only limitation on PIN codes is length. Some devices, such as Bluetooth headsets, may have a fixed PIN code built in. The -d switch forces hcsecd(8) to stay in the foreground, so it is easy to see what is happening. Set the remote device to receive pairing and initiate the Bluetooth connection to the remote device. The remote device should indicate that pairing was accepted and request the PIN code. Enter the same PIN code listed in hcsecd.conf. Now the computer and the remote device are paired.

The following line can be added to /etc/rc.conf to configure hcsecd(8) to start automatically on system start: