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.

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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Moving MySQL databases into MariaDB

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I had a problem with MySQL 8.4 recently. Eventually I gave up and resorted to moving to MariaDB. Switching applications because I hit a problem isn’t something I usually do lightly. Overview Most of the work won’t be shown here. However, this is an overview: Created a new jail on the host: [12:09 zuul dvl ~] % sudo mkjail create -j mariadb01 -a amd64 -v 15.0-RELEASE Add new DNS entries for that jail

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nagios03: drive recovery

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After zpool upgrade blocked by gpart: /dev/da0p1: not enough space, I’ve decided to create a new Azure VM, snapshot the now-faulty-drive, attach it to the host, and start zfs replication to copy the data to new drive. Or something like that. The existing drive needs to be imported with a checkpoint rollback, then copied to a drive with different partition sizes. Here’s the new host: My first impression: why only 174K for the

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Upgrading PostgreSQL in place on FreeBSD

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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

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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

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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

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, FreshPorts, Jails, Open Source, ZFS / By /

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

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, mySQL, Open Source, snapshots, ZFS / By /

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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