2019

Creating a mirror from your zroot

I planned to create a zroot mirror when I installed FreeBSD on the R720 but the supplier shipped only one of the two purchased SSDs. Today the second drive arrived. Let’s create a zroot mirror. In this post: FreeBSD 12 man 8 zpool Posts I looked at: creating a mirrored ZFS Pool out of a single-disk rpool – not FreeBSD Convert Single disk ZFS-On-Root to Mirror – used the GUID via zbd; I […]

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Service names vs host names

Over the years, I have learned not to rely on hostnames for important services. Hosts go away, new ones come in. I want to rely on, what I refer to as, service names. For example, instead of relying on a hostname for my ntp server, I have: $ host time time.int.unixathome.org has address 10.55.0.1 This hostname, or service name, appears in /etc/ntp.conf on every physical host in my network. time.int.unixathome.org is not a

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Dell R720 – reducing power consumption

This post talks about how I reduced the power consumption on my Dell R720 by adjusting the configuration settings. In this post: Dell R720 Sources I found Taming a 12th gen Dell PowerEdge when I was researching data cables for the SAS card I was going to use. For the record, the cables referred to in that post are wrong for what I used. I bought a pair of DELL POWEREDGE R520 R530

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Installing internal PCI Slot SSD drive enclosures in a Dell R720

I like to build systems that boot using drives directly connected to the M/B. No HBA, no SATA cards, etc. I like the simplicity involved. Sometimes that target is hard to achieve. The first step to configuring the R720 was upgrading the firmware. I spent time on hardware selection, including power and data sources. I also spent time looking at NVMe booting, but abandoned that idea. Earlier this week, enough hardware had arrived

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Preparing the Dell R720 for ZFS

I have obtained a Dell R720 containing 10 x 400GB SSDs. The drives are connected to a RAID controller (H710P) which cannot do JBOD / IT mode. This means the drives are effectively hidden from ZFS, which is never good. In this post: FreeBSD 12.0 ZFS Dell R720 SAS 9207-8i This post describes past work and future plans for this server as I get it ready to be a general purpose server running

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Updating firmware etc on a Dell R720

See also: Updating firmware etc on a Dell R730 I started writing this blog about a month ago. Last night, I did the firmware upgrade completely forgetting I had this draft post in my blog. Instead of reading this, I wound up doing something very similar, and pretty much lived tweeted it. After upgrading the IDRAC to the latest, I then went into the LifeCycle Controller and upgraded nearly all the things. However,

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scripts for monitoring vulns in FreeBSD jails

I have scripts for monitoring vulns in FreeBSD jails. They use third-party scripts. All I wrote was the Nagios part of the solution. I was preparing slides for my Why I prefer thick jails over thin jails talk at EuroBSDCon 2019. There is still time to register and attend. I was explaining my scripts and was providing links to gist.github.com … I realized I should create a repo: https://github.com/dlangille/freebsd-nagios-jail These scripts do the

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poudriere hooks

zi0r suggested I use hooks to accomplish my patches-outside-distfiles question. In this post: FreeBSD 12.0 poudriere 3.3.2 I started reading the documentation and played with the supplied sample files in /usr/local/etc/poudriere.d/hooks. For background, see FreeBSD custom port patches when using poudriere. Eventually I came up with this solution: mkdir during the start phase mount during the mount phase I put stuff into a gist first, then created this post. The hook This is

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