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.

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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Upgrading a FreeBSD 14.3 host to FreeBSD 15.0

Today, I again mused about FreeBSD 15.0 and pkgbase. It’s freezing outside, and I’m going for an Indian dinner in about 2 hours. Let’s see if I can break r730-01 with my upgrade attempt. In this post: FreeBSD 14.3 (starting point) FreeBSD 15.0 (target) The docs I’m starting with official docs: FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE Installation Instructions That directs me to Upgrading from Previous Releases of FreeBSD And then the binary update via Upgrading Using

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