2024

What’s this gap in the graphs?

I was checking email this (Friday Jul 19, 2024) morning, over coffee, while many IT folks dealt with Cloudstrike fallout, when I noticed this message from the logs: Jul 19 09:12:18 zuul kernel: [zone: pf states] PF states limit reached I’ve seen that message before. It’s not of high concern. That server contains many services including PGCon, the former BSDCan website, and my blogs. I didn’t give it much concern, although I should […]

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Where’s my backup?

Nagios was telling me: FILE_AGE WARNING: /usr/home/rsyncer/backups/aws-1/postgresql/freshports.org.dump is 117636 seconds old and 3608113799 bytes That means the FreshPorts backup is more than a day old, and it should have been refreshed by now. OK, let’s go look. I log into the host known as aws-1 and check the files. They look fresh to me: [rsyncer@aws-1 ~/backups/database-backup/postgresql]$ ls -lt total 3525154 -rw-r–r– 1 rsyncer rsyncer 3963 Jul 16 02:14 globals.sql drwxr-xr-x 2 rsyncer rsyncer

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Transferring a VM from one provider to another

Yesterday, I mentioned (in more than one place) that I planned to move a 2017 Digital Ocean droplet over to Azure. As I sit here, with coffee, on the balcony, overlooking lot of green trees, at 7:45 AM, I’m trying to put into words the plan I came up with about 30 minutes ago. In this post: Digital Ocean Microsoft Azure FreeBSD 14.1 Why move? There is no technical issue or dissatisfaction involved

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Updating some jails from FreeBSD 14.0 to FreeBSD 14.1 via mkjail

I’ve updated all my hosts to FreeBSD 14.1 – but not all the jails. I’m going to do some of that today. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 FreeBSD 14.1 mkjail-0.0.4 What’s on r730-03 to update? Full disclosure: mkjail was originally written by Mark Felder, and I joined him in maintaining it. I use it for: Creating jails Updating jails (patching, like freebsd-update fetch install) Upgrading jails (as in going from FreeBSD 14.0 to

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Notes on running net-snmp as non-root

When feasible, I prefer to run things as non-root. A recent commit to net-snmp has made this possible. By its nature, being a new change, it took me some time and help to figure out what needed to be changed. Before doing this yourself, I recommend waiting until the two code reviews mentioned below are committed. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p6 net-snmp-5.9.4_2,1 librenms-24.5.0,1 I include commands from different host; please do not be

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Copying an existing jail to try bind918

bind916 will be EOL in a few months (April 2024). In this post, I’m going to copy an existing jail (running bind916) and configure it to run the new bind. If all goes well, the new jail will replace the old jail. This has an added benefit of effectively renaming the old jail (toiler) to dns2 (my other dns server at home is called dns1). Given the jail runs both dhcpd and named,

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Moving local settings for pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf out of PGDATA

One of the configuration aspects of FreeBSD I have long liked is the concept of default values which are overridden by the user. For example, /etc/defaults/rc.conf (see The /etc directory). The default values in this file can be overridden by the user with their preferred values in /etc/rc.conf (or /etc/rc.conf.local, and other locations if you so choose (search for rc_conf_files)). With that approach in mind, I wanted to do the same thing with

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Adding a new user to my Time Capsule – on ZFS with Samba

I have another laptop I want to backup using my Time Capsule jail. Here are the step I used. Create a Unix User I have no idea if I need to do this. But I did. But now, I’m thinking, it is not required, at all. But read on, I think I’ll show you where I use it. [21:56 tm dvl ~] % sudo adduser Username: dvl-pro04 Full name: For backing up pro04

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OK, we got a Time Machine on ZFS on FreeBSD. So what. Can we restore from it?

I have written recently about creating a ZFS-based Time Machine on FreeBSD. Yesterday, I did my first restore from this instance. Surprise. It worked. Please move along. Nothing to see here. Just photos. The motivation: I’m replacing one MacBook with another. Some details here on Twitter. Edit – 2024-02-22 After I messed up when renaming a user account, I restored from backup. Since my Time Machine is only available via my VPN, I

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