For BSDRP you need:

• a 256Mb Compact Flash/USB stick.
• a minimum of 256MB RAM.

All hardware supported by FreeBSD 9.1 is supported by BSDRP with the exception of following drivers:

Wireless, PCMCIA cards, SCSI adapters, USB printer, fire wire, etc. drivers were removed from the FreeBSD kernel.

The BSDRP images use this filename convention:

BSDRP_release_image type_arch_console.img.xz

The value image type can be:

• full : To be used for installing BSDRP. This image contain full BSDRP filesystem (bootloader, 2 systems partitions, cfg partition and data partition)
• upgrade : To be used for upgrading BSDRP. This image contain only one system partition.

The value arch can be:

• i386 : for i486, i586 and i686 CPU
• amd64 : for all x86-64 CPU (amd64 or intel 64)

The value console can be:

• vga: To be used with a vga card and keyboard as default console (but it's still possible to connect to the serial port)
• serial: For headless use, use only serial port as default console

Examples:

• BSDRP_0.3_full_i386_vga.img, means full image, for arch i386, with keyboard/vga as console.
• BSDRP_0.3_upgrade_amd64_serial.img, means upgrade image, for arch amd64 on headless serial.

The *.mtree.xz files are used for system integrity check.

Here are the 2 steps for writing the image to a CF/USB removable media:

1. Decompress the BSDRP image file 7-Zip: You need to obtain a file with .img extension.
2. Use Image Writer for Windows for writing the image file .img (and not the file with .xz extension) on your CF/USB connected to your PC.

Connect your Compact Flash or USB disk and write down the device name (sd4 for a usb key in this exemple).

Then unzip the file and byte copy it to your drive (Warning: Double check that you had choosen the good destination disk!!!):

xzcat BSDRP_full_amd64_vga.1.0.img.xz | dd of=/dev/sd4 bs=64k

You can boot from this media now.

Connect your Compact Flash or USB disk and write down the device name (da0 for a usb key in this exemple).

Then unzip the file and byte copy it to your drive (Warning: Double check that you had choosen the good destination disk!!!):

xzcat BSDRP_full_amd64_vga.1.0.img.xz | dd of=/dev/da0 bs=64k

You can boot from this media now.

Insert the USB key, and run mount in a terminal (or disk utility if you prefer graphical method) to see what device OSX has assigned to your USB key. You should see something like this:

/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local)
fdesc on /dev (fdesc, union)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, automounted)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted)
/dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/UNTITLED (msdos, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)

The last line is your USB device. Unmount it and write the BSDRP image to it with:

sudo umount -f /dev/disk3s1
xzcat BSDRP_full_amd64_vga.1.0.img.xz | dd of=/dev/disk3 bs=64k

If successful, OSX will pop up an error dialog telling you it doesn't recognize the disk. Click 'Eject', remove the USB key, and you're done.

Boot BSDRP from the previously generated usb key, then from BSDRP, display the BSDRP system diskname:

[root@router]~# glabel status | grep BSDRP
 ufs/BSDRPs3     N/A  da0s3
 ufs/BSDRPs4     N/A  da0s4
ufs/BSDRPs1a     N/A  da0s1a

⇒ On this example BSDRP is on disk da0 (USB key)

Display all the system disks:

[root@router]~# sysctl kern.disks
kern.disks: ad0 da0

⇒ On this example, because da0 is the BSDRP disk, ad0 is the hard-drive where we want install BSDRP.

First, avoid the error message “the primary GPT table is corrupt or invalid.” by cleaning the 2 GPT tables on the destination hard drive

setenv DRIVE "da0"
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/${DRIVE} bs=1m count=1
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/${DRIVE} bs=1m oseek=`diskinfo ${DRIVE} | awk '{print int($3 / (1024*1024)) - 4;}'`

Then copy the BSDRP disk to the hard-drive:

[root@router]~# dd if=/dev/da0 of=/dev/ad0 bs=64k
3920+0 records in
3920+0 records out
256901120 bytes transferred in 8.803739 secs (29180910 bytes/sec)
GEOM: ad0s1: geometry does not match label (255h,63s != 16h,63s).

Reboot your system (and don't forget to remove the USB key).

Once rebooted from your hard drive, you can expand the /data slice for using all the free space:

system expand-data-slice

For using BSDRP as a Virtual Machine, refers to chapter How to run in the Technical docs.

Once BSDRP is started for the first time, don't forget to lower the default kern.HZ value that is not optimized for a VM usage by entering this command:

system virtualized

The FreeBSD (BSDRP) bootloader default configuration isn't compatible with the WRAP: You need to change the bootloader mode before to use it on a WRAP platform. From a FreeBSD host, once you had installed the image on your CF, change the bootloader mode (replace daX by your device):

boot0cfg -o nopacket /dev/daX

This method requiered a SCP server:

• any unix/linux with SSH enabled
• or a MS Windows with SSH server software

From the router:

1. Download BSDRP-upgrade.image.xz file with SCP
2. Extract the image
3. Use the upgrade script

All these steps are done with this command:

ssh my-user@my-ssh-server cat /path-to/BSDRP-upgrade.image.xz | xzcat | upgrade

This method requiered a SSH client (all Linux/Unix should include it).

From the client, enter this command:

cat BSDRP_1.2_upgrade_amd64_vga.img.xz | ssh root@a.b.c.d "xzcat | upgrade"

This method requiered:

• A minimum of 50MB of free RAM on your BSDRP (mem_avail value in the “show mem” output)
• A SCP client on your MS Windows (FileZilla or WinSCP for example)

Resume:

1. Create a 25MB ram disk on BSDRP
2. Transfert the BSDRP image upgrade on the ram disk using the SCP client
3. Upgrade the system

Step 1: Creating the ram disk

On BSDRP, enter theses commands:

set RAMDRIVE=`mdconfig -a -t malloc -s 30m`
newfs -m 0 -n $RAMDRIVE
mount /dev/$RAMDRIVE /mnt/

Step 2: Using your SCP client, send the BSDRP upgrade image to the router's /mnt folder.

Step 3: After transfer complete, On BSDRP, enter this command:

xzcat /mnt/BSDRP-upgrade.image.xz | upgrade
umount /mnt

Login as root with no password.

If you are using the serial version, serial port parameters are: 38400,8,N,1,MODEM

Start by using the help:

help

Create a password for root (mandatory for SSH):

passwd

Enter in quagga mode:

cli

Do your quagga configuration, and save quagga config and exit quagga cli:

wr
exit

Then save all changes:

config save

BSDRP is a FreeBSD, then you need to read how to configure a FreeBSD for using it.

Here is a list of useful documentations:

• BSDRP Examples
• FreeBSD Handbook:
  • Bridging
  • Link Aggregation and Failover
  • Alternate Queuing
  • IPv6
• FreeBSD Man Pages
• Quagga Manual
• Bird user manual

All configuration changes (/etc, /usr/local/etc) need to be saved before a reboot.

Use the config command for saving configuration:

[root@R1]~#config
BSD Router Project configuration tool
Usage: /usr/local/sbin/config option
  - diff     : Show diff between current and saved config
  - save     : Save current config
  - apply    : Apply current config
  - rollback : Revert to previous config
  - put      : Put the saved config to a remote server
  - get      : Get config from remote server
  - reset    : Return to default configuration
  - help (h) [option]  : Display this help message.
                        If [option] given, display more detail about the option

SSH access with the root user is not available by default: You need to set-up a password for the root account before with the passwd command.

Example:

[root@R1]~# passwd
Changing local password for root
New Password: XXXXXXXX
Retype New Password: XXXXXXXX

Reference mtree file are provided for checking the integrity of all your files on your router.

You can check your BSDRP system integrity using these references files by downloading the corresponding file into your router and using “system integrity” command.

As example, if you are using 0.35 amd64-serial release, from your BSDRP router (if it had DNS resolution and Internet access configured):

cd /tmp
fetch http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/bsdrp/BSD_Router_Project/0.35/BSDRP_0.35_amd64_serial.mtree.xz
system integrity BSDRP_0.35_amd64_serial.mtree.xz

The root filesystem is in read-only mode, then you can't modify or create your own script on it.

For modify the existing script (don't forget to send us your improvement), use the “data” partition. Here is an example for customizing the config script:

mount /data
cp /usr/local/bin/config /data
vi /data/config

Now you can add your great patches to config script. And test it:

sh /data/config

Then, don't forget to umount the /data partition:

umount /data

You can modify the full filesystem by re-mount the active slice in read-write mode:

mount -uw /

Now you can modify all files or removing/installing package.

Here is how to remove bird as example:

[root@router]~#pkg_info | grep bird
bird-1.2.1 Dynamic IP routing daemon
[root@router]~#pkg_delete bird-1.2.1

After your changes, re-mount it in read-only mode:

mount -ur /

Polling can be used in 2 cases:

• On old hardware only (where Ethernet card doesn't support Intelligent interrupt management), using the “polling” mode can improve performance by reducing CPU interrupt
• When used for usage in a Virtual Machine.

For enabling polling mode:

1. Edit /etc/rc.conf.misc and replace polling_enable=“NO” by polling_enable=“YES”
2. Execute: /usr/local/etc/rc.d/polling start

Check the FreeBSD forwarding Performance page for more information.

BSDRP can use some special features on somes NIC:

• Ethernet device polling for high performance with Ethernet controllers that didn't include interrupt management feature or for usage in a VM.
• ALTQ for queuing

And only theses devices support these modes:

Using others NIC will works too