Author name: Dan Langille

I've been playing with computers since I read an Elementary Electronics magazine way back in the 1970s. I started contributing to open source projects in 1998. After that, I gradually moved from being a software developer to being a systems administrator.

nagios03: drive recovery

After zpool upgrade blocked by gpart: /dev/da0p1: not enough space, I’ve decided to create a new Azure VM, snapshot the now-faulty-drive, attach it to the host, and start zfs replication to copy the data to new drive. Or something like that. The existing drive needs to be imported with a checkpoint rollback, then copied to a drive with different partition sizes. Here’s the new host: My first impression: why only 174K for the […]

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Upgrading PostgreSQL in place on FreeBSD

I’ve updated one of my PostgreSQL instances to PostgreSQL 18, it’s time to update the others. This time, I’m going to try pg_update. My usual approach is pg_dump and pg_restore. As this is my first attempt doing this, I’m posting this mostly for future reference when I try this again. There will be another blog post when I try this again. Which should be soon. This paragraph will link to that post when

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zpool upgrade blocked by gpart: /dev/da0p1: not enough space

This seems to be inconvenient. Now I have to rollback to that checkpoint. [20:52 nagios03 dvl ~] % sudo zpool checkpoint zroot [20:52 nagios03 dvl ~] % sudo zpool upgrade zroot This system supports ZFS pool feature flags. Enabled the following features on ‘zroot’: redaction_list_spill raidz_expansion fast_dedup longname large_microzap block_cloning_endian physical_rewrite Pool ‘zroot’ has the bootfs property set, you might need to update the boot code. See gptzfsboot(8) and loader.efi(8) for details. [20:52

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452 4.3.1 Insufficient system storage

This is a long post. There’s a lot of stuff in here. There’s no quick and dirty how-to. It’s a diagnostic record. Hope it helps. This morning I saw log entries I’ve never noticed before. They seem to have started 9 hours ago. First, this email arrived. cliff2 is one one two hosts behind cliff: [7:25 pro05 dvl ~] % host cliff cliff.int.unixathome.org has address 10.55.0.44 cliff.int.unixathome.org has address 10.55.0.14 In this post:

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Upgrading a jail by replacing it

This new post replaces one on another blog: https://news.freshports.org/2025/09/13/updating-a-jail-by-replacing-it-1-0-1/ I’m placing it over here because: I’m changing how I do it I couldn’t find it when I went searching – I was only looking here In this post: Old jail – FreeBSD 14.3 Host has been updated to 15.0 That old jail is in a jail already updated to 15.0 mkjail-0.0.8 The problem FreshPorts has three mail jails on each node: ingress01 –

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I broke my FreeBSD MySQL jail; got it working again by using a snapshot

I was upgrading a host the other day. The mysql02 (that’s the hostname) jail broke. I suspect I did something like upgrading the package while the server was in use. I noticed LibreNMS wasn’t running: *** /var/log/librenms/librenms-service.log *** Feb 10 18:37:30 besser librenms[23957]: MainThread(CRITICAL):ERROR: Could not connect to MySQL database! (2003, “Can’t connect to MySQL server on ‘mysql02.int.unixathome.org’ ([Errno 61] Connection refused)”) Feb 10 18:37:30 besser librenms[23957]: (2003, “Can’t connect to MySQL server

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Poudriere symlinks for repos

I have some repos which are specific to certain tasks. Every time I upgrade major version (as I just did from FreeBSD 14.3 to FreeBSD 15.0), I need to remember to go in and add in those symlinks. I forget just about every time. I get errors like this: # pkg upgrade -f Updating local repository catalogue… pkg: Repository local has a wrong packagesite, need to re-create database pkg: Failed to fetch https://fedex.int.unixathome.org/packages/FreeBSD:15:amd64-mysql84//meta.conf:

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FreeBSD 15.0 – after upgrade, installing my own packages

I build my own FreeBSD packages using poudriere. The chicken-and-egg situation: I can’t build FreeBSD 15.0 packages until I’m on FreeBSD 15.0 – and upgrading to FreeBSD 15 involves a step of upgrading all your packages before the final steps of the upgrade. What do I do? I disable my repos and enable the FreeBSD repos. If you’re using your own repos, you should already know how to do this. In this post:

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