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.

Identifying jails and data to migrate from old host to new host

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, hardware, Jails, Open Source, R730 / By /

I’m retiring knew and moving the services over to r730-03. I recently added 2 12TB drives to the latter host. In this post, I’ll start the migration process by identifying what data needs to move, from where, and to where. In this post: knew r730-03 FreeBSD 13.2-RELEASE-p2 The data There are the zpools in question: [15:19 knew dan ~] % zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT […]

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Changing how I use IP address with FreeBSD’s vnet – so IPv6 works

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The vnet (network subsystem virtualization infrastructure) on FreeBSD is both a blessing and a curse. For me, it isn’t working well with IPv6. I’ve hit issues with pf (since solved, I’m sure). It’s a useful feature but can be confusing. It helps to have lots of time to think about it and what you’re doing. I talked about this amongst the FreeBSD jail group and out of that came a blog post: The

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Testing two 12TB drives in a Dell R730 on FreeBSD

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disks, hardware, R730, smartctl / By /

I’m ready to downsize. I’m going to replace knew with r730-03. The former has 20 5TB drives. I don’t need all that space now. I’ll settle for 12TB instead. The two new drives arrived today: [23:39 r730-03 dvl ~] % grep da2 /var/run/dmesg.boot da2 at mrsas0 bus 1 scbus1 target 2 lun 0 da2: Fixed Direct Access SPC-4 SCSI device da2: Serial Number 8CJVT8YE da2: 150.000MB/s transfers da2: 11444224MB (23437770752 512 byte sectors)

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Home Assistant – moving from the HA Greeneye integration to hacs-greeneye-monitor

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I started using Home Assistant (HA) for graphing the power consumption of my house. Many months before venturing down that road, I bought a Greeneye Monitor (GEM). A current transformer has been installed on each circuit in my breaker box (see the photos near the bottom of this album). I chose HA for that. I first trying installing from FreeBSD packages into a FreeBSD jail, but then reluctantly abandoned that approach in favor

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Using FreeBSD’s daemon(8)? Consider -r

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FreshPorts make use of a simple python daemon (fp_listen). It has been in use since at least 2006. It was (I think) vermaden who mentioned it (I can’t find the reference) and it triggered an idea. The role of fp_listen is to listen for backend notifications and respond accordingly. One of its primary goals is to clear the front end cache as required. Part of that strategy involves a persistent connection to the

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pkg: No SRV record found for the repo ‘local’

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Today I removed and added the same package. The add failed. Background: I install from my own custom package repo server I do not install from the FreeBSD package servers My packages are built via poudriere The same basic repo configuration file has been in use for years This is what I just encountered: [tallboy dan ~] % sudo pkg install postfix Updating local repository catalogue… Fetching meta.conf: 100% 163 B 0.2kB/s 00:01

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vnet jail on FreeBSD not letting pings through from another non-vnet jail

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NOTE: this problem was fixed by moving all the IP addresses to the bridge. See Changing how I use IP address with FreeBSD’s vnet – so IPv6 works I just restarted my pkg01 jail. Now Nagios can’t see it on IPv6. In fact, none of the jails on this host can now ping pkg01. This is FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE-p6 I did try DAD (based on this previous post, but that’s no help here). [17:19

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Monitor your backups

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It’s good to do automated backups. When you do that, add monitoring to make sure the backups are occurring successfully. In my case, I backup using Bacula. Each job creates a new .bsr file. I copy these files to another location each day. Then I monitor the dates on those files and they should all be less then a day or so old. Edit (added 2023-08-29) This post is about upgrading net-mgmt/unifi6 to

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Nagios 3: moving from nrpe 3 to nrpe 4 – what needs changing?

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Nagios, Network monitoring / By /

Yesterday, I noticed this message in one of the “daily security run output” emails which FreeBSD host can send out. I’ve used net-mgmt/nrpe3 for several years. It checks remote hosts and runs any number of predetermined commands and returns the results. It’s stable, highly configurable, and just keeps running. I had a look at the replacement (net-mgmt/nrpe) and decided to build and install it. First, it went onto my poudriere package bulding host

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What runs on the servers at home?

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The last time I did this inventory was 2018. It is time for a refresh. I have added comments to the output of the jls command. This is a brief description of what runs in each jail. Retired hosts slocum and r720-01 have been powered off after being merged into r730-01. r730-01 r730-01 is a Dell R730 and is now my main server. [dan@slocum:~] $ jls -v | grep ACTIVE | cut -f

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