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.

Migrating ZFS filesystems from one zpool to another – same host

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Not so long ago, a disk space issue arose. I obtained some new drives (thank you to those who donated) and I consolidated some of the space. However, I had not yet taken care of the problem. For my first example, I’ll copy my vm data over. In my next post, I’ll copy dev.freshports.org to a new dataset. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 What happened? Yesterday, the chickens came home to roost. The […]

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My solution for copying backups around the homelab

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I have database servers outside the homelab, as in not in my basement. They are in datacenters. I don’t let them push the backups into the basement. Instead, I let them call home asking for the backups to be picked up. I prefer it that way. As I describe it, it may seem complex to do multiple steps when one step will do. However, this solution promises that the backups are ready and

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Creating a FreeBSD virtual machine using bhyve-vm

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I had a need for FreeBSD-16.0-CURRENT. I’m already using sysutils/vm-bhyve (Management system for bhyve virtual machines, relevant blog post). These steps really are very short notes. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 (the host system) vm-bhyve-1.7.0_1 FreeBSD 16.0-CURRENT The very short notes The VMs I had before I started: [23:36 r730-01 dvl /data04/images/FreeBSD] % sudo vm list NAME DATASTORE LOADER CPU MEMORY VNC AUTO STATE freebsd-test default bhyveload 1 256M – No Stopped hass

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maintenance script changes

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After I wrote the script to put up a maintenance page for my websites, I came up with two more things to display on the page: Timestamp for start of maintenance Reason for maintenance In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 The new script The new script is invoked like this: [14:11 r720-02-proxy01 dvl ~] % ~/bin/offline dev.freshports.org "$(date -R -v +2H)" "Offline for database update" <html> <head> <title>Error 503 Service Unavailable</title> <style> <style> body

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Hacking openvpn to use syslog with something other than facility = daemon

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I don’t see a way to specify the syslog facility for OpenVPN – perhaps I can change that in the code. It would allow logging openvpn to a specific file and being able to rotate that log file. –log-append does not allow for log rotation. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 OpenVPN 2.6.19 Signals sent to OpenVPN do not affect logging. Thus, I must rely upon syslog and newsyslog to achieve log rotation. At

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Script to generate that maintenance.html file for taking my websites into maintenance mode

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In a recent blog post, I showed you how I was taking my websites into maintenance mode. Shortly afterwards, I wrote about how using $server_name can have odd consequences. Today, I’m writing about the script I just created which will create those maintenance.html files. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 nginx 1.28.2 bourne shell The script This is the script: [12:17 r720-02-proxy01 dvl /usr/local/www/offline] % cat ~/bin/offline #!/bin/sh # Usage: ~/bin/offline foo.bar "$(date -R

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Using variable names in nginx declarations has a price: e.g. ssl_certificate /usr/local/etc/ssl/${server_name}.fullchain.cer;

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I recently implemented a fun (to me) and easy solution for taking my web proxy websites offline, either one-by-one, or all-at-once. Today’s post talks about some of the repercussions which followed one-new-thing I tried. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 nginx 1.28.2 I jump between testing the test host and stage host; both had similar issues. The relevant changes This is the type of change I started to do. Instead of putting the hostname

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ddclient 4 changes

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After a 4-hour power outage today (crews were working on the power lines), my home IP address changed, perhaps for the first time in over a year. I also noticed ddclient was no longer installed on my host. This blog post outlines changes from the original article. In this post: I’m mostly documenting my local changes based on the previous post. FreeBSD 15.0 ddclient-4.0.0 Updates to the Ansible playbook for ddclient: https://github.com/dlangille/ddclient/ forked

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Taking your nginx website offline for maintenance? I have an idea.

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From time to time, I need to take an nginx webserver or website offline for whatever reason. I might be migrating the database behind the website, the hardware might be powered off for work, etc. In my case, these points might help you follow along with what I’m doing: FreeBSD 15 nginx-1.28.2 there is an nginx proxy in front of the website – this nginx instance has no real content; it uses proxy_pass

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