Call to undefined function filter_var() on FreeBSD

• https://www.rubenerd.au/call-to-undefined-function-filter-var/

Posted by Luis Emanuel to r/BSD:

I daily-drive Linux at work and FreeBSD on my personal ThinkPads (T480 & P52 currently). Both laptops and both operating systems, every day. I'm the kind of person who reads freebsd-update output and Phoronix benchmarks in the same hour.

Recently saw the "is FreeBSD really that goated" thread and it brought back the timeline of my own journey. Started with a rough — call it version 0.9 — build that barely had X11 working, evolved through five iterations, landed on something I'd call "production-stable personal desktop" around version 2.0 on FreeBSD 15.0 with a heavily customized MATE, ZFS boot environments, BastilleBSD jails for microservices, WireGuard tunnels and PF.

If I could send a packet back in time to my earlier self, here's what I'd put in the payload:

…

Question for this sub

What's the one thing you wish someone had told you in your first year on FreeBSD?

I suspect we'll generate a better FAQ in this thread than the wiki currently has.

Yesterday from the same author:

• The Cathedral, the Bazaar, and the Two Systems on My Desk | The FreeBSD Forums

The SMTP mail server for the 21st century and onwards is OpenSMTPD, which is developed as an integral part of OpenBSD, but available in a portable variety too. It was one of those things that I had fully intended to do years ago, but I only got around to actually doing once there was a definite deadline to get it done. The time has come, as OpenBSD 7.9 will leave the exim package behind, and exim users will need to find a replacement before upgrading. This article describes my transition to OpenBSD's own OpenSMTPD mail server.

• https://nxdomain.no/~peter/time_for_opensmtpd.html
• https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2026/05/opensmtpd-is-mail-server-for-future.html

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@pitrh@mastodon.social/116577188355690184

FreeBSD 15.2 Will Aim For The Nice KDE Desktop Installation Experience

FreeBSD 15.0 had aimed to provide a KDE desktop install option from its text-based OS installer to make for a more compelling FreeBSD out-of-the-box desktop experience. That was then delayed to FreeBSD 15.1 but that didn't end up materializing. Now the KDE desktop install option is diverted to FreeBSD 15.2...

• https://www.phoronix.com/news/FreeBSD-15.2-KDE-Desktop

Open source software has existed long before the invention of the (D)VCS. The author likely hosted a barebones HTML webpage or a txt file describing the project. There definitely was an FTP server somewhere with tarballs. The author may have been reachable by email.

• https://blog.feld.me/posts/2026/04/open-source-does-not-imply-open-community/

Back in April 2026 Anthropic caused a lot of media noise when they concluded that their new AI model Mythos is dangerously good at finding security flaws in source code. Apparently Mythos was so good at this that Anthropic would not release this model to the public yet but instead trickle it out to a selected few companies for a while to allow a few good ones(?) to get a head start and fix the most pressing problems first, before the general populace would get their hands on it…

• https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/05/11/mythos-finds-a-curl-vulnerability/

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@bagder@mastodon.social/116554421974341351

This page lists some of the changes I make to a vanilla install of FreeBSD for security hardening. Some changes to increase network performance or make things a bit more sane are also included. It only covers basic changes that a sysadmin can make to a running system.
It could also be considered a commentary piece on the state of security in FreeBSD's development ecosystem, highlighting their strong resistance to change and unwillingness to replace old cruft with modern alternatives.
The project's security page says the following:

FreeBSD takes security very seriously and its developers are constantly working on making the operating system as secure as possible.

But is that really true? Let's find out.

• https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults

ping: https://mastodon.social/@CuratedHackerNews/116549957974859573

See:

• https://minwm.btxx.org/

ping: https://mastodon.bsd.cafe/@bt/116573608067727480

=> 662: I need a hero

Cybersecurity Looks Like Proof of Work Now, Compensating for RAM Constraints with L2ARC on ZFS, GhostBSD 26.1, and more...

• https://www.bsdnow.tv/662

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce the fourth (and this time hopefully final) release candidate of the upcoming 11.0 release, please help testing!
See the release announcement for details.

• https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_11_0_rc4_available
• https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-11/NetBSD-11.0.html

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@jaypatelani@bsd.network/116570729312543808

FreeBSD Foundation Laptop Update:

• https://freebsdfoundation.github.io/proj-laptop/monthly-updates/2026-04 or
• https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/blob/main/monthly-updates/2026-04.md

Cross-post: https://redd.it/1tc70zr

Generally, the value of two-character tags is questionable.

That said, can an exception be made? As a tag:

• ai

Topics such as https://billboard.bsd.cafe/post/227 would fit.

The alternative, twenty-three characters, is way beyond the fifteen-character maximum:

• artificial intelligence

Thanks

Elsewhere, https://forums.freebsd.org/posts/544567 drily noted that "… Any suggestions to implement a two-char search limit will be met with a ban …" however that was with regard to searching within body text, not metadata. XenForo with MySQL.

OpenBSD stories — OpenBSD/cats: the enabler :

• http://miod.online.fr/software/openbsd/stories/zaurus1.html

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@miodvallat@hostux.social/116525872455289794

Network-oriented readers will be familiar with the concept of overload tables, commonly used with state tracking options to create adaptive rulesets for such things as punishing password-guessing botnets.

A downside to tables that would tend to fill up indefinitely is that at some point they will be quite full, and the administrator would need to either manually run pfctl expire or set up a crontab entry to weed out old entries at intervals.

• https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20260513064948
• https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=177846164902091&w=2

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@openbsdjournal@mastodon.social/116565993077076112

morning, alll. i have meet problem in freebsd15 bridge ... i have create a bridge as below content
#for ipv4 only LAN
21 │ ifconfig_re0="up"
22 │ create_args_bridge5="addm re0 name re0lan"
28 │ cloned_interfaces="bridge5"
29 │
30 │ #for home..
31 │ ifconfig_re0lan="inet 10.8.1.200 netmask 255.255.255.0"
defaultrouter="10.8.1.253"

ok. #vm switch create -t manual -b re0lan public ...

#vm switch list
NAME TYPE IFACE ADDRESS PRIVATE MTU VLAN PORTS
public manual re0lan n/a no n/a n/a n/a

#vm create -t freebsd-zvol -s 10gb -m 2gb fb15
#vm start fb15

ok. when fb15 start or stop , the bridge ping defaultrouter 10.8.1.253 will lost packages. why ? please help me .thanks..... when i start or stop jail attach this bridge .. the problem will appear again... thanks.

The pkgbase way of things on FreeBSD is still not fully mature (and officially marked as experimental). I tried to cover all pkgbase things in the Brave New PKGBASE World article but I need to add one another thing…

• https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2026/05/10/freebsd-pkgbase-minor-upgrades/

ping: https://mastodon.social/@vermaden/116547440312687324

This additionally adds gnome and kde support too.

also there's a wip installer for the script for the time being while its not in the official openbsd ports collection.

I plan on re-submitting the ports to ports@ once the ports tree unlocks again.

https://github.com/outpaddling/desktop-installer/blob/master/OpenBSD/getting-started.md

An open invitation to Linux users across the board, offering a closer look at the penguin and its iceberg, a walk across the ecosystems that make it possible, an exploration beyond one’s biome.

• https://club.unix.rocks/commentary/under-linux/

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@fcambus@mastodon.sdf.org/116557961134185563

Every single software product is dealing with the question about what to do with “AI”-generated code, but the question is particularly difficult to answer for open source operating systems like Linux distributions and the various BSDs, which often consist of a wide variety of software packages from hundreds to thousands of different developers. On top of that, they also have to ask the “AI” question for every layer of their offering, from the base install, to the official repositories, to community-run ones…

• https://www.osnews.com/story/144935/openbsd-and-slopcode-raindrop-to-a-torrent/

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@osnews@mstdn.social/116558432820118949

“The server feels slow.” It is the most common ticket text in the world, and the least useful. Before you can fix anything you need to know whether the box is CPU bound, memory pressured, waiting on disk, saturating a NIC, or simply running a runaway process in one jail that is starving everyone else. On jail hosts, the second half of the problem is attribution: not just what is overloaded, but which jail is responsible…

• https://blog.hofstede.it/freebsd-resource-monitoring-accounting-and-troubleshooting/

ping: https://framapiaf.org/@Larvitz@burningboard.net/116560508989633469