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.

Creating a backup boot drive from a zroot mirror

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disk Cloning, Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, R730 / By /

Today, using FreeBSD 14.3, I’m going to test booting from a drive which is a mirror of the boot drives. This is what I’m booting from: root@r730-04:~ # zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT zroot 923G 1.72G 921G – – 0% 0% 1.00x ONLINE – root@r730-04:~ # zpool status zroot pool: zroot state: ONLINE scan: resilvered 3.74M in 00:00:01 with 0 errors on Thu Nov 20 […]

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gpart backup | gpart restore does not alway give you exact replication

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Today I was setting up some drives for testing. I did this manually: root@r730-04:~ # gpart create -s gpt da2 da2 created root@r730-04:~ # gpart add -t efi -s 260M -a 4k da2 da2p1 added root@r730-04:~ # gpart add -t freebsd-swap -s 8G -a 4k da2 da2p2 added root@r730-04:~ # gpart add -t freebsd-zfs -a 4k da2 da2p3 added root@r730-04:~ # gpart show da2 => 40 62533216 da2 GPT (30G) 40 532480 1

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Moving a zpool to larger drives #ZFS #FreeBSD

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, R730 / By /

It is a rainy Wednesday morning and I’m drinking a cappuccino in my favorite cafe. A five minute walk from here, in the basement of an 1890 Victorian twin house, sits r730-04. Last weekend, I configured it to boot from two SATADOM drives. Today, I’ll move that zpool to a pair of larger drives. I’ve done that move before and it is a common procedure for increasing zpool capacity. Later today, I’ll move

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Duplicating partitions to a larger drive #ZFS #FreeBSD

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As I was writing a different blog post, I came across this interesting situation. I couldn’t create the same partition layout on the new drive. This is the existing drive: root@r730-04:~ # gpart show ada0 => 40 242255584 ada0 GPT (116G) 40 532480 1 efi (260M) 532520 2008 – free – (1.0M) 534528 16777216 2 freebsd-swap (8.0G) 17311744 224942080 3 freebsd-zfs (107G) 242253824 1800 – free – (900K) root@r730-04:~ # I started to

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Using SATADOM drives in a Dell R730

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A recent goal is to increase the available storage space in my main development server in the basement. To that end, two recent posts: r730-01: the drive replacement plan r730-01: storage plan The SATADOM devices I purchased are meant to be plugged directly into the M/B of the server. This approach will free up two PCIe slots which were hosting 2x 2.5″ SSDs in a hot-swap adaptor (the post mentions a Dell R720;

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PostgreSQL: MD5 password support is deprecated – updating the user passwords

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Eight years ago, PostgreSQL introduced scram-sha-256 hashes for passwords. Eleven months ago, MD5 was deprecated. Yesterday, I got caught up with all this. Some of this post will deal with how I fixed it, but mostly it is documenting (for myself) what I did. The fix covers several services and takes place over multiple days. First, some background on why this change has come into focus for me. I have a FreeBSD jail

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r730-01: storage plan

Leave a Comment / Disks, hardware, nvme, R730 / By /

Following on from What will I do with those 2 x 1TB drives?, I received a fantastic suggestion from Mike Gerdts. Do more bifurcation. Buy an ASUS HYPER M.2 X16 GEN 4 CARD and put 4x NVMe devices on each one. I can be adding 8 more storage devices to the chassis. I see posts from people using this card in a Dell R730xd – The host in question is a Dell R730.

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What will I do with those 2 x 1TB drives?

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During zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs I replace 2x 1TB drives with 2x 4TB drives. This afternoon as I was taking laundry down to the basement, I realized: I have two unused drives in the host. Either I remove them or I repurpose them. I know I have 4x 1TB drives (two SSDs and two NVMe). I could make a 2TB mirror out of them. Where can I use them? r730-03

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zfs: setting compression and adding new vdevs

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If you read my recent posts, I’m replacing an existing zpool with new devices. At first, I went to copy the old zpool to a new zpool. I then decided instead of copying, to replace. I’m also going to see about compression. I’m sure it won’t take effect, because replace is a block-by-block copy, or so I think. We’ll confirm. Before Here is the zpool, really, just the top-level filesystem. Notice how compression

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