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.

Updating FreeBSD 15.0 to FreeBSD 15.1 (via pkgbase)

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NOTE: I suspect some configuration file changes happened silently. See FreeBSD – /etc/pam.d/sshd was updated/overwritten – no merge attempt I decided that Thursday morning at 8:27 AM was the right time to start my first update from FreeBSD 15.0 to 15.1 – all my hosts are now on pkgbase. I used the pgkbasify script. Now it’s time to update again. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 (before) FreeBSD 15.1 (after; hopefully) The host is

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During a power outage, how do the three servers in the basement react?

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Over the weekend, some branches fell on a neighbor’s power service line. They still had power, but the branches had to be removed. That removal occurred this morning. I saw the trucks at about 6:45 AM as I walked past. I suspected I might lose power, and I did. This post records the shutdown and power on times/sequences. I might find this useful should I need to reevaluate the power-outage procedures. My thought:

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data04: DEGRADED

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This morning I noticed this in the logs after doing some pkg upgrade. I was mainly updating openvpn, but in that operation, fail2ban was removed (because I went from python312 to python314). I noticed it missing on one host: I ran this grep to verify fail2ban had been removed from another host: Well, this host doesn’t run fail2ban, but those messages are “interesting”. How much is nvme mentioned in the logs? [12:31 r730-01

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Running pkgbasify on a FreeBSD 15.0 jail

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It’s time. All my hosts are on 15.0 and on pkgbase. Next, let’s move a jail to pkgbase. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 the jail is named empty NOTE: After running this from within the jail, I learned I should run it from the host and using the -j parameter. I’ll create a new blog post once I do another jail. PLEASE use this updated post instead. I’m following instructions based on the

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after pkgbasify – not finding all the repos?

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If, after moving to pkgbase (for me, that was via pkgbasify), you discover you can’t find the package in question, you might, like me, run this command: % pkg repos -e [18:25 r720-02 dvl ~] % pkg repos -e local: { url : “https://fedex.example.org/packages/FreeBSD:15:amd64/”, enabled : yes, priority : 0, signature_type : “PUBKEY”, pubkey : “/etc/ssl/slocum.unixathome.org.cert” } Not to worry, that’s my local repo. What’s missing there is pkgbase. When I compare this

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pkgbasify: Authentication error

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In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 If you’re running pkgbasify, and you hit this message: [15:02 zuul dvl ~/tmp] % fetch https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua fetch: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua: Authentication error … my “fix” was: [15:04 zuul dvl ~/tmp] % fetch –no-verify-peer https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua fetch: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua: Authentication error [15:04 zuul dvl ~/tmp] % fetch –no-verify-peer https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua fetch: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua: Authentication error [15:04 zuul dvl ~/tmp] % fetch –no-verify-peer https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua pkgbasify.lua 21 kB 25 MBps 00s [15:04 zuul dvl ~/tmp] % As

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pkgbasify: /var/empty is a readonly zfs filesystem.

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After my initial success yesterday with pkgbasify, today, I hit a block. This was my fourth host conversion. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 The block There I was, minding my own business, when this jumped up and hit me. [root@tallboy:~] # sudo bectl create before-pkgbasify [root@tallboy:~] # uname -a FreeBSD tallboy.unixathome.org 15.0-RELEASE-p10 FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE-p10 GENERIC amd64 [root@tallboy:~] # fetch https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify/raw/refs/heads/main/pkgbasify.lua pkgbasify.lua 21 kB 1910 kBps 00s [root@tallboy:~] # chmod +x ./pkgbasify.lua [root@tallboy:~] #

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Did VictoriaLogs miss any logs during the reboot?

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Yesterday, I modified r730-01 by Running pkgbasify on FreeBSD 15.0 – as a consequence, my log collecting jail was offline. Did it miss any logs? Let’s find out. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 syslog-ng-4.11.0_2 (sending logs from FreshPorts production) victoria-logs-1.50.0_2 (receiving logs in the logs jail The period in question Looking at /var/log/messages, I see: With syslogd now stopped, there are no further logs until: NOTE: I had not set the logs jail

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Running pkgbasify on FreeBSD 15.0

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At BSDCan 2026, I attended the pkgbase in Production: A Practical Overview talk. What impressed me was the ease with which one could upgrade from 15.0 to 15.1 etc. Included in the demonstration was pkgbasify (“Automatically convert a FreeBSD system to use pkgbase”). In this post: the host being modified is running FreeBSD 15.0 Today, I took the plunge on my r730-01 host. Following the instructions at https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/pkgbasify I did the following. I

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Adding syslog-ng to a host to extract Nginx logs

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This replaces and combines two earlier posts: Replacing syslogd with syslog-ng (sysutils/syslog-ng) on FreeBSD. Getting Nginx logs into Victoria-Logs I just got Victoria Logs running. Now I want to get logs into it. For starters, I want to get the logs on the host itself into Victoria Logs. I figure this is a log-risk experiment. In this post: FreeBSD 15.0 victoria-logs-1.50.0_2 syslog-ng-4.11.0_2 I’m installing syslog-ng on a host (x8dtu) The nginx logs reside

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