2023

Blatant self interest – monitor light

A friend introduced me to monitor lights earlier this year. I thought about getting one, but didn’t. I added it to my wish-list and I recently received one. I really like it. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. This is what I bought: OOWOLF Monitor Light Bar with Remote Screen Light Bar (Amazon link). I took these photos one evening in my office. See the URL above for details.

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FreeBSD jailed ZFS datasets – how do I find the .zfs/snapshot directory?

On FreeBSD, you can jail a ZFS dataset – that is, the jail can manipulate the ZFS dataset as if it was a host (more or less). This has useful applications. In my case, I want to backup a snapshot of that dataset from the host. For example, I want to backup this dataset: [12:19 r730-01 dvl ~] % zfs list data02/freshports/jailed/dev-ingress01/data/latest_commits NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT data02/freshports/jailed/dev-ingress01/data/latest_commits 572K 798G 120K /var/db/ingress/latest_commits Within

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Backing up FreeBSD with Bacula via ZFS snapshot

Tonight, while watching an episode of The Great British Bake Off, I configured a new Bacula backup jobs to cover some datasets which were not already backed up. I already have a backup jobs to backup all the jails, but only for datasets which sit right under zroot/jails (for example). This new solution takes a list of datasets, snapshots them, backs them up, then destroys those snapshots. Why backup a snapshot? Consistency. During

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Debugging snmp output when using LibreNMS

Librenms is my tool-of-choice for grabbing metrics from switches, servers, wireless access points, and anything else with an snmp interface. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 LibrenMS 23.11.0,1 – updated to 23.11.0_1,1 within this post net-snmp-5.9.1_4,1 After updating some hosts to FreeBSD 14, the zfs application/extension broke. It was quickly amended after a report was lodged. However, after the fix, I still wasn’t getting graphs. It was nan all across the board for ZFS:

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ntpd[66134]: leapsecond file (‘/var/db/ntpd.leap-seconds.list’): will expire in less than 9 days

If you’ve been watching your logs, you’ve probably noticed messages like this: In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 ntpd .2.8p16-a (included with the base OS) There are several FreeBSD PR lodged, the most relevant (to me) is ntpd: leap-seconds.list should not run inside jails, and IETF is no longer hosting it. The fix I am using: Tell ntpd to use this source for leap-seconds. [14:02 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo sysrc ntp_leapfile_sources=https://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/ntp/leap-seconds.list ntp_leapfile_sources: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/plain/contrib/tzdata/leap-seconds.list

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Avoiding repetition within jail configurations

Without resorting to configuration tools, such as Ansible, I wonder if there is an easy way to avoid repeating a list of datasets within a jail configuration. First, some facts: FreeBSD 14.0 I use plain vanilla jails I know this can be easily scripted with a configuration tool; that is out of scope for this post I want to explicitly list the datasets; taking all the children of a given dataset is out

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Post upgrade – checking the jails

Stuff goes wrong. I like to check. Trust. But. Verify. Skip to the end for the list of useful commands. Here’s some of that verification, as briefly mentioned in FreeBSD 14 upgrade – files not removed by delete-old and Excluding some jails from upgrade. After upgrading all the jails on r730-01, I wanted to make sure that all the binaries had been updated from FreeBSD 13. Here’s what I did. This tells me

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Excluding some jails from upgrade

I have some jails already updated to FreeBSD 14 – let’s get a list of what needs to be updated. This cold just as easily be used to get a list of what not to upgrade, if you didn’t want to update all jails right now. These jails are already updated: [15:30 r730-01 dvl ~] % file /jails/*/bin/sh | grep 14 /jails/bacula/bin/sh: ELF 64-bit LSB pie executable, x86-64, version 1 (FreeBSD), dynamically linked,

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FreeBSD 14 upgrade – files not removed by delete-old

I was upgrading a jail (dns1) on r730-01 and I noticed this output from mkjail: In this post: FreeBSD 13.2 (upgrading from) FreeBSD 14.0 (upgrading to) mkjail-0.0.4 (upgrading with) EDIT: 2023-12-05 : This happened again when I updated the tallboy host. Looking at the mkjail source, I realized it had just completed the pkg upgrade and delete-old steps. I manually ran the delete-old command: [14:01 r730-01 dvl ~/src/scripts] % sudo jexec dns1 make

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