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.

Leveling out the NVMe cards on the adaptors

I recently obtained two 4TB NVMe cards and two PCIe adapters, each of which holds two NVMe cards. This is what they looked like fully loaded: The thinner NVMe is the new 4TB card, and the thicker card is the 1TB card, with heatsink, which I’ve had for some time. Yesterday I noticed the NVMe cards were not parallel with the adaptor. Earlier today, I fixed that. First, let’s look at the angles. […]

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r730-01: the drive replacement plan

This post is mostly for my benefit, so I can keep track of my plan for adjusting space. It doesn’t contain much of educational value. For what I actually did, see zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs One recent day, I powered off r730-01 and took inventory of the 16 drive bays. A short overview: [17:36 r730-01 dvl ~] % zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH

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Cannot override /etc/newsyslog.conf with /etc/newsyslog.conf.d/newsyslog.conf

FreeBSD has a great concept of establishing default values and letting the user override them. That approach does not apply to newsyslog, and specifically, newsyslog.conf This idea came up on IRC after I said I was looking forward to a new FreeBSD 15 which allows the compression specified in newsyslog.conf to be overridden. Using /etc/newsyslog.conf.d Getting a clean copy First, I grabbed a pristine copy of /etc/newsyslog.conf from the repo: [12:34 r730-01 dvl

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Dell R730 – The session has timed out waiting for verification of the certificate – slot bifurcation details – plus NVMe plans

Today I was trying to access my Dell 730 (r730-01) via the remote console. I failed. Twice. First and expected failure First, this was usual and expected. It’s been a problem both at home and at work. It is the inability to access the console via https using the hostname This is what I see: I can get in via IP address though. Second and new-to-me failure Next, after logging in via IP

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Finding out more about nvme on FreeBSD

Recently I’ve been playing with NVMe to find out more about monitoring for wear. Tried nvme-cli: [17:49 r730-01 dvl ~] % nvme list Failed to scan topology: No such file or directory Seems it is a known problem. Went with this instead: [17:52 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo nvmecontrol devlist nvme0: Samsung SSD 980 PRO with Heatsink 1TB nvme0ns1 (953869MB) nvme1: Samsung SSD 980 PRO with Heatsink 1TB nvme1ns1 (953869MB) With more information

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Mounting and unmounting zfs filesystems within a #FreeBSD jail

I have a jail on r730-01 called dvl-ingress01. Here are some filesystems related to that jail: [11:50 r730-01 dvl ~] % zfs list | grep dvl-ingress01 | grep repos NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT data02/freshports/dvl-ingress01/ingress/repos 8.65G 1011G 112K /jails/dvl-ingress01/var/db/ingress/repos data02/freshports/dvl-ingress01/ingress/repos/doc 706M 1011G 678M /jails/dvl-ingress01/var/db/ingress/repos/doc data02/freshports/dvl-ingress01/ingress/repos/ports 3.53G 1011G 2.30G /jails/dvl-ingress01/var/db/ingress/repos/ports data02/freshports/dvl-ingress01/ingress/repos/src 4.44G 1011G 2.73G /jails/dvl-ingress01/var/db/ingress/repos/src data02/freshports/dvl-ingress01/repos 120K 1011G 120K /jails/dvl-ingress01/var/db/ingress/repos That is not a complete list, but it illustrates the filesystems I’m working with

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Updating a FreeBSD 14.2 host to FreeBSD 14.3 via freebsd-update

I’m ready to update r730-01 (I see that link is from 2024 – I’ll refresh it after this update) from FreeBSD 14.2 to FreeBSD 14.3. First, some clean up: [21:04 r730-01 dvl ~] % bectl list BE Active Mountpoint Space Created 14.2-RELEASE-p4_2025-08-08_112039 – – 342M 2025-08-08 11:20 default NR / 11.6G 2024-06-19 16:38 testing – – 74.0M 2025-08-09 10:59 [21:04 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo bectl destroy 14.2-RELEASE-p4_2025-08-08_112039 [21:04 r730-01 dvl ~] %

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Running short on space on the FreshPorts development zpool

It’s been some time since I asked for public donations for hardware. In this case, I’m asking for donations to buy two more storage devices to expand this zpool: [18:08 r730-01 dvl ~] % zpool list data02 NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT data02 1.73T 1.39T 351G – – 66% 80% 1.00x ONLINE – Most of the space is used for FreshPorts, however it is not for the

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Connecting to Time Capsule provided via Samba (on ZFS)

I use Mac laptops. Have for years. I make use of their Time Machine backups. I configured Time Capsule instance using Samba, FreeBSD, and ZFS (latest) and today I added a new user to that configuration. Next, I wanted to start the backups. I didn’t find details in my blog, so that prompted this post. In this post: This post assumes you’re already configured the server (see above links). FreeBSD 14.2 samba 4.16.11

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Can’t get to some Disney links

This is mostly for my future reference, for when this happens the next time. I hope it saves me 10-15 minutes of pondering. I noticed this problem a few days ago. I was clicking on links in an email from Disney. The hostname didn’t resolve. I passed it off as: well, they got problems… It happened again today. Hold on, this isn’t likely. I tried the link again, from my phone, with wifi

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