su -m keeps root’s HOME, and psql notices

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In February 2024 I wrote about could not open certificate file “/root/.postgresql/postgresql.crt”: Permission denied. I fixed it by adding sslcertmode=disable to the connection string, and ended with: does anyone know why this might have happened? That fix has been copied into several scripts since, for example the one in Why does this PostgreSQL \copy fail when launched by the daemon? Tonight I hit it again, and this time the cause was plain to

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ports-mgmt/git-proxy – caching proxy for package registries, including FreeBSD pkg

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Open Source, pkg, Proxies / By /

I’ve heard about and thought about proxies for pkg servers for some time. Perhaps years, but definitely months. I never took action until I saw this commit in today’s FreshPorts new ports email: ports-mgmt/git-proxy Caching proxy for package registries, including FreeBSD pkg Today. This morning, during coffee at my local shop, I implemented one in my basement. The following shows you how I did it. Every host in the basement fetches packages: base

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Turning Mailman 2.1 into static archives, at the same URLs

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Mail, Mailing Lists, Mailman, Open Source / By /

I have been running Mailman 2.1 since at least 2006. It is long past end of life, it still needs Python 2.7, and the lists it carries have all gone quiet. Some moved elsewhere (BSDCan went in April 2024), the rest just stopped. Time to turn it off. The one thing I did not want to lose was the archives. Lots of old links point at them, from mailing list posts, from blog

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Search gate traffic – how a cookie helped performance

Leave a Comment / FreshPorts, nginx, Open Source, PostgreSQL / By /

On 17 October, at 10:17 UTC, the search gate went live on www.freshports.org. A search from a visitor without a login or a search_ok cookie now gets a small challenge page instead of a search. I wrote about the first day in the FreshPorts October speed-up post. This post looks at the twelve days since. I expected the traffic to drop once the bots got nothing for their trouble. It didn’t. What dropped

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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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