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.

writing random data via geli

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You might recall that suspect drive from the zpool replace on the weekend. Thomas Hurst suggested: Might be worth overwriting the drive, try to encourage it to actually reallocate the sectors now the data on them is no longer needed. I, being one to take advice from people on the internet, and Michael W Lucas, decided to try his suggestion. The drive in question. [dan@knew:~] $ tail /var/log/messages Dec 14 00:00:00 knew newsyslog[88570]: […]

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The replacement – a followup

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Yesterday, I started a zpool replace. It finished overnight, and dropped the suspect drive out of the vdev. The resilver finished in the middle of the night: As you can see, da22p1 has taken the place of da17p1. The resilver took As the new drive is being resilvered, I started looking at metrics. Here is gstat. Look at how da22, the replacement drive is getting all the writes, compared to the others. LibreNMS

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Replacing a failing drive in a ZFS zpool

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In this post I will replace a working, but suspect, drive with another drive. No down time. The server is knew. In this post: FreeBSD 12.2 ZFS TOSHIBA MD04ACA500 5TB drive – the suspect drive: da17 TOSHIBA HDWE150 5TB drive – the replacement: da22 None of these drives are under warranty What drives are in this server? I have had good luck with Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB drives (presenting as Hitachi HDS723030BLE640), starting a

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smartctl output TOSHIBA MD04ACA500 653AK2MXFS9A

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It is time to replace /dev/da17 in knew. The replacement drive is also documented. The replacement procedure has also been documented. An upcoming blog post will document the replacement. I’m seeing these messages: Dec 12 09:23:03 knew smartd[2124]: Device: /dev/da17 [SAT], 40 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Dec 12 09:53:04 knew syslogd: last message repeated 1 times Dec 12 10:23:03 knew syslogd: last message repeated 1 times Dec 12 10:53:04 knew syslogd: last message

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Missing dependencies from mail/mailman3

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This started off as a migration. It went down a rabbit hole of incorrect and undeclared dependencies. I’m going to post this as documentation for the required ports update. I’m migrating from Mailman 2.1 to Mailman 3 not because I want to but because Python 2.7 is deprecated. I’m sick of seeing these monitoring messages: In this post: FreeBSD 12.1 mailman-2.1.34 (source) py37-mailman-3.3.1 (destination) Snapshots I’m taking a snapshot of this FreeBSD iocage

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Hosting multiple web servers behind a single IP address

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Virtual hosts for a website are a thing. One webserver can host multiple websites. They can all be on the same IP address, different IP addresses, different ports, etc. This post is about using a proxy service. Before I started with this solution, at home I hosted every website on the same server. My firewall would redirect incoming ports 80 and 443 to my webserver, and Nginx/Apache would take care of the rest.

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Using split DNS for websites hosted locally

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The dev.freshports.org website is hosted on server in my basement. For you, that IP addresses resolves to a publicly available IP address. For me, that IP address resolves to an RFC 1918 address: $ host dev.freshports.org dev.freshports.org has address 10.55.0.24 Sometimes this is referred to as split dns, also known as split-horizon DNS, split-view DNS, split-brain DNS, or a fricking stupid thing to do). How? I have a DNS zone file at home

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Recalibrating an APC UPS

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This work was done in August. Since then, I have replaced the APC with an Eaton 5PX, and I am much happier. This might make for interesting reading, but that depends on how bored you are.. Following on from my failed calibration attempts, I thought I would try it again this morning before work. In this post: APC UPS SUA2200RM2U with a AP9619 Network Management card LibreNMS 1.66 FreeBSD 12.1 Before It’s 1132

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Restoring your non-Apple Time Capsule from your Mac

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I have written about backing up your MacBook to a ZFS-based Time Capsule. Today, I restore. I am setting up a laptop to be just like my other laptop. This is not a disaster recovery incident, but it could be. In this post: The laptop is on the same network as the time capsule host (i.e. no VPN). The laptop is on a wired network – not required, but I think that would

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