Quieting a jail’s mail, and a prompt that wasn’t mine

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Jails, Mail, Open Source / By /

I was looking inside the index jail today and found this: root@index:/ # ls -l /var/mail/ total 25 -rw–w—- 1 root mail 51258 Oct 27 03:27 root That jail doesn’t do much. Nobody reads that mail. I wanted it gone. Along the way, I fixed something else which had been bothering me for a while: a broken prompt whenever I used jexec. What was in the mailbox Before turning anything off, I checked

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4098 bits strikes again: pam-ssh-agent and an RSA key that was 2 bits too big

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In August, I wrote about replacing security/pam-ssh-agent-auth with security/pam_ssh_agent. The old module is abandoned and deprecated. The new one, pam-ssh-agent, was a drop-in replacement in /usr/local/etc/pam.d/sudo: auth sufficient /usr/local/lib/pam_ssh_agent.so file=~/.ssh/authorized_keys I saw no problems with it, except when this one case. The symptom With an ssh-rsa key, sudo fell through to the next PAM entry, and this showed up in the logs: pam_ssh_agent(sudo:auth): authorized keys from ‘/usr/home/foo/.ssh/authorized_keys’ pam_ssh_agent(sudo:auth): signature error: cryptographic error pam_ssh_agent(sudo:auth):

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Backing up my gitea via mirroring

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I run a Gitea instance at git.langille.org. Some of what’s on there is a pull mirror of a GitHub repo. Some of it exists nowhere else. That second group bothers me. If that server goes away, so do those repos. I’m sure I can find another existing script and use that. Please point one out to me if you find it. UPDATE 2026-10-27: This script just automagically mirrored a recently added repo. This

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data04: DEGRADED – S7KGNU0Y912955D again

2 Comments / nvme, ZFS / By /

Two days ago, I was greeted with these message. There are two recent issues: data04: DEGRADED – 102 days ago data04: DEGRADED – oh and have I mentioned WatchGoose? – 30 days ago The first link mentions the problem device (S7KGNU0Y912955D) as seen below on the highlighted line 129. Fixing it This time, as in the previous two incidents, a power cycle failed to bring back the missing device. Today, I pulled the

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Migrated your repo from subversion to git? Here’s how I migrated my working copies.

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The long-used FreshPorts subversion repositories have been converted from subversion to git. The process I used is documented in https://github.com/FreshPorts/git-conversion. Today, I’m moving the working copy subversion checkouts to git working copies. The original code is retained and any local changes will be available for check-in / diff after the conversion. Here’s an outline of that process. FreshPorts left Subversion on 5 October 2026, but the hosts didn’t. The ingress code on each

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data04: DEGRADED – oh and have I mentioned WatchGoose?

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I saw this today in my logs on r730-01. It looks similar to a previous DEGRADED even back on July 2. In this case, the device is S7KGNU0Y915666E, not S7KGNU0Y912955D as it was back then. The zpool status is: [12:16 r730-01 dvl ~] % zpool status data04 pool: data04 state: DEGRADED status: One or more devices have been removed. Sufficient replicas exist for the pool to continue functioning in a degraded state. action:

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FreeBSD backup libraries such as base/FreeBSD-kerberos-lib-backup-libkrb5profile.so

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I build my own FreeBSD packages using poudriere. I do this for various reasons, which include: Getting security updates faster because I build nightly Some packages I install use non-default build options One of the monitoring checks I have in place will identify any installed package which is not in the package repository. That helps me identify any failed package builds or packages I have build once, installed, and did not added to

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Replacing security/pam-ssh-agent-auth with security/pam_ssh_agent

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Yesterday, I learned that security/pam-ssh-agent-auth is abandoned and deprecated. Looking back, I first used this about 13 years ago, and wrote about it while describing how I set up ansible clients. Today, I tried one of the two recommended replacement: security/pam_rssh – mentioned by Romain Tartière security/pam_ssh_agent – the one I’m trying Note the package vs the port Note this point. The package name is: [15:03 empty dvl ~] % pkg info -x

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Attempting to reproduce the missing etcmerge from 15.0 to 15.1 upgrade

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This post documents my attempt to reproduce the problem outlined in FreeBSD – /etc/pam.d/sshd was updated/overwritten – no merge attempt FYI, this bug report was created before I did this work: pkgbase upgrade to 15.1 restores default /etc/pam.d/* configuration I have a working test jail: testingmerge Snapshot of 15.0 [12:11 r730-03 dvl /usr/local/share] % zfs list | grep testingmerge data01/jails/testingmerge 374M 7.62T 374M /jails/testingmerge [12:16 r730-03 dvl /usr/local/share] % sudo zfs snapshot data01/jails/testingmerge@clean-15.0

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FreeBSD – /etc/pam.d/sshd was updated/overwritten – no merge attempt

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I was wondering why hare did not seem to be working anymore. FYI, this bug report was created before I did this work: pkgbase upgrade to 15.1 restores default /etc/pam.d/* configuration I tracked it down to a missing line in /etc/pam.d/sshd. The file is there in this snapshot: [12:24 r730-01 dvl /jails/serpico/.zfs/snapshot] % diff -ruN autosnap_2026-08-04_00:00:18_daily/etc/pam.d/sshd /jails/serpico/etc/pam.d/sshd — autosnap_2026-08-04_00:00:18_daily/etc/pam.d/sshd 2023-12-03 16:38:51.359135000 +0000 +++ /jails/serpico/etc/pam.d/sshd 2026-06-12 09:42:15.000000000 +0000 @@ -21,4 +21,3 @@ # password

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