NAME

kbfsd —

service daemon for the Keybase filesystem (KBFS)

SYNOPSIS

The required rc.conf(5) variables:

kbfsd_enable=“NO”
kbfsd_user=“user”

Optional rc.conf(5) variables:

kbfsd_keybase_username=“${kbfsd_user}”
kbfsd_mountpoint=“/keybase”

DESCRIPTION

kbfsd is an rc(8) daemon for the Keybase filesystem (KBFS). Its aim is to ease the process of using KBFS on FreeBSD. It takes care of the configuration the Keybase user would have to do manually otherwise.

kbfsd does not start automatically even when kbfsd_enable is set to “YES” in rc.conf(5). See the CAVEATS section for more details.

kbfsd has to configure some bits of the system in order to mount KBFS as kbfsd_user. kbfsd_mountpoint is created and the sysctl(8) tunable vfs.usermount is set to “1” so that kbfsd_user could mount kbfsd_mountpoint. Then kbfsd_user is added to the “operator” group to be able to use the /dev/fuse device. Finally, kbfsd attempts to spin off the Keybase server and create required socket files. Note that this step requires kbfsd_user to be able to log in as kbfsd_keybase_username. This should be possible once kbfsd_user registers a device with “keybase device add”.

kbfsd may be controlled with the following rc.conf(5) variables:

kbfsd_enable: (bool, default: “NO”) Enable kbfsd.
kbfsd_keybase_username: (str, default: kbfsd_user) The username used to log into Keybase.
kbfsd_mountpoint: (str, default: “/keybase”) The directory where KBFS should be mounted.
kbfsd_user: (str, no defaults) The login name of a user, who should own kbfsd_mountpoint. It cannot be empty.

INSTALLATION

The easiest way is to just install the kbfsd package via pkg(8) on FreeBSD:

pkg install kbfsd

kbfsd can be installed manually with the following command:

make all
make install

FILES

/home/${kbfsd_user}/.config/keybase/kbfsd.${kbfsd_user}.pid: PID file.

EXIT STATUS

The kbfsd daemon exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs.

AUTHORS

The kbfsd daemon and its manual page were written by Mateusz Piotrowski <0mp@FreeBSD.org>.

CAVEATS

kbfsd is not started automatically together with other daemons during boot because it uses the “nostart” KEYWORD (see rc(8) for details). The reason is that in order to reliably mount KBFS the user has to establish a session with the Keybase server first. This is done by calling: “keybase login username”. Unfortunately, this command happens to block the booting process from time to time, which is unacceptable.

BUGS

kbfsd seems to kill kbfsfuse too rapidly for kbfsfuse to properly unmount. As a workaround, kbfsd calls umount(8) on the mount point in the poststop phase (see rc.subr(8)).

Currently, kbfsd uses kbfsd_env internally to set the HOME environmental variable to the home directory of kbfsd_user. It is recommended to read the service file before setting kbfsd_env in rc.conf(5).

On some FreeBSD versions older than 13.0 the name of fusefs(5) might be “fuse” instead of “fusefs”. As a result, kbfsd might fail to start. A potential workaronud is to set required_modules to an empty string in /usr/local/etc/rc.conf.d/kbfsd and then loading the FUSE kernel module differently (e.g., via kld_list in rc.conf(5)).