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.

Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

But first, there’s more Right after asking “Anyone running zfsd? Did you do anything in particular to configure it? I just added my first hot-spare to a zpool.”, ivy told me “noooooooo don’t use hot spares!! Keep a cold spare or at least an online device not attached to a pool. otherwise your zpool will randomly decide to attach its hot spare due to a temporary cabling issue or something like that. the

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network connectivity issues – in the #homelab

Yesterday a big storm came through. Many downed trees (photos here). The power went off at about 0500 and came back again at about 1009, off again at 1309, back at 1319. It was then stable for the rest of the day. Overnight, I saw monitoring alerts which initially made me think there was another power cut. uptime showed that was not the case. I also didn’t see any timeout messages meaning the

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invalid user dan or illegal user dan? Why different messages?

Last night, I wanted to update several hosts which were running sysutils/samdruckerclientshell. I ran csshX host1 host2 host3 … hostn. I didn’t get connected to all the host, so I closed out those screens and tried againg, adding -l dvl to the command. I got connected. Updated the packages, and went on with other tasks. What happened? On the laptop I was using, I was logged in as the user dan, so the

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Why don’t my hosts get IPv6 routes?

I started this off as a post on FreeBSD Forums, but as I composed it, I decided it was better as a blog post. This post is most likely not useful to anyone. I solved the problem by rebooting the gateway. I never did find out the cause of the routing issue. Astute readers will recognized the IP4 and IPv6 addresses in this post – they are taken from RFCs which designate ranges

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powerd++: Not always savings

First, let me be clear: I am a fan of powerd++. I use it on all servers in the basement. A recent test shows my gateway does not benefit from it. To determine the range of this graph, I consulted my logs: [11:31 gw01 dvl ~] % sudo grep powerd /var/log/auth.log Mar 25 12:38:12 gw01 sudo[73534]: dvl : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/usr/home/dvl ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/service powerdxx sto Mar 25 12:38:18 gw01 sudo[73544]: dvl

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Installing the replacement UPS

Around the end of last year, I started having trouble with my used Eaton 5PX – I’d had it for about 5 years and it was used when I bought it off eBay. On Saturday night (about 21:33:48 UTC), the home network disappeared off the Internet. I figured my new gateway had died. The dead UPS Sunday morning, I returned from the remote undisclosed location to the basement #homelab. Entering the basement, it

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Get faster OpenVPN on FreeBSD by enabling DCO – easily done

I’ve been configuring a new gateway server for use in my basement data center (home lab). I had recently read about DCO and FreeBSD’s opvn device. DCO (Data Channel Offload) let’s OpenVPN use the encryption features available in many CPUs. In my previous post, I checked; my OpenVPN server and most of the clients are DCO-capable. I decided to try it. I found documentation lacking as to how to use it. I took

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Problems with OpenVPN when server is FreeBSD 14.2 and client is 14.1

After replacing an existing gateway with new hardware, the OpenVPN connections had issues. The clients would connect, but non-trivial amounts of traffic would cause errors. This post contains a workaround, by upgrading the OS. I would like to know the cause. In this post, these are the version in use: FreeBSD 14.2 (for the OpenVPN server and some of the clients) FreeBSD 14.1 (for some of the clients) OpenVPN 2.6.13 (on the server

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Invoking ddclient from dhclient to update 3rd party dynamic dns hosts on FreeBSD

In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 ddclient-3.11.2 Ansible playbook for ddclient: https://github.com/dlangille/ddclient/ forked from https://github.com/hammadrauf/ddclient/ In my previous post, I configured dhclient to setup my Hurricane Electric tunnel and notify HE of same. First attempt: [12:39 gw01 dvl ~] % sudo ddclient [12:47 gw01 dvl ~] % tail /var/log/messages … Mar 6 12:47:50 gw01 ddclient[52929]: WARNING: ” is not a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address Mar 6 12:47:50 gw01 ddclient[52929]: WARNING: found neither IPv4

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