About a week ago, I was doing some HDD benchmark tests and I accidentally specified the boot drive as the source for a test. Oops. Everything was OK. Until I rebooted. It would not boot. I figured I knew what happend. I’d munged my boot code. And I knew how to fix it. However, I didn’t realize that I’d also deleted the boot partition. I asked on the FreeBSD dev IRC channel. db […]
Oops, I deleted my boot partition Read More »
From time to time, my Bacula – space and time website shows some old jobs that need to be copied to tape. Stuff from 100 days or more. There’s no reason to copy stuff that old to tape. It’s already been copied to tape. So why does it appear? Last night I swapped some tapes in the tape library. This morning they would have been used and recycled. I’ll bet that those tapes
Deleting old Bacula Volumes Read More »
Sometimes, you need to restore. But you don’t know when the file changed. Here’s a simple SQL query which shows me that information: And here is the output Based on that output, I want to look at restoring from Jan 13 and before. That’s when the filesize change last changed from 172KB.
Bacula: When did that file change size? Read More »
A server was decommissioned lately. It was running on a VM. Given that I do not have physical control over the HDD, I will be revoking the certificate for that server. This certificate was used for VPN access. That’s something I don’t want to be used by anyone else. Here is how I revoked it. I do not know why I had to enter 5 twice.
ssl-admin: revoking a certificate Read More »
I’ve been testing drives lately. Mostly hard disks, but also one solid state drive. The test itself is automated, but manually started. That’s because it requires a reboot between each run. That restricts testing time to certain hours of the day. I’d like to automate this. Today I had what may be a clever solution: Use the @reboot feature of crontab(5) to start a script after reboot In that script, cd to a
Automating that regression testing Read More »
I noticed today that the serial number for Toshiba drives, as retrieved by smartctl(8) is not the whole serial number. I am not sure why. I discovered this when I went to check the warranty information for a drive. The drive is fine; I just wanted to check. Using smartctl, I got this: Right there, on line 7, you can see the serial number. Count it. It’s 9 characters. Now visit the Toshiba
smartctl: Toshiba HDD serial numbers are only 9 characters Read More »
I have a special HDD. It runs FreeBSD 9.1 and contains a bunch of tools that I use when setting up new servers. I hook it up to a new server when I’m working on it. Or I hook it up to a server which is in pain and fix it. I want it to have the same IP address every time. The conventional way to do this is by MAC address. On
dhclient: sending a host identifier to the DHCP server Read More »
The LSI 9211-8i 6Gb/s SATA +SAS HBA, which I recently obtained, is running the stock IR (Integrated RAID) firmware. In order to use the disks in strictly passthrough mode and avoid having any metadata written to them by the card, the card needs to be changed over to IT (Initiator Target) firmware. I had heard about this before. And I’ve read it about it on the From 32 to 2 ports: Ideal SATA/SAS
Flashing IT firmware for LSI 9211-8i on FreeBSD Read More »
I was looking around for warranty checking pages. I found these for my HDD: Western Digital Toshiba Seagate and Maxtor
HDD warranty checks Read More »
Wyze uses this tuning on his 2GB NAS box. # Dynamically adjust write limit based on previous txg commits to attempt # to maintain a 2-second commit time vfs.zfs.txg.synctime_ms=”2000″ # Set a minimum write limit of 50MB which is slightly more than the default vfs.zfs.write_limit_min=”50M” # Default vfs.zfs.write_limit_shift appears to be “3” which on a system # with 2GB RAM such as this one results in a write_limit_max of 256MB, which # is