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.

Running FreeBSD on OSX using xhyve, a port of bhyve

bhyve is a hypervisor/virtual machine manager developed on FreeBSD. xhyve is port of bhyve to OS X. It is built on top of Hypervisor.framework in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and higher, runs entirely in userspace, and has no other dependencies. I usually use MacPorts, but ran into trouble with xhyve, so this morning I tried Homebrew instead. Installing Homebew (often referred to as brew) is outside scope, so please refer to their documentation. […]

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newsyslog: chmod(/var/log/auth.log.6.bz2) in change_attrs: No such file or directory

This problem was difficult to figure out. The cause was simple, but not obvious. Messages such as this were appearing in emails From July: In August: I had no idea why. My initial suspicion was the /etc/newsyslog.conf configuration for that file: [dan@knew:~] $ grep auth /etc/newsyslog.conf /var/log/auth.log root:logcheck 640 7 * @T00 JC [dan@knew:~] $ That count is 7, so why is it complaining about 6? The files look ok: [dan@knew:~] $ ls

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PostgreSQL – convert a user to a role

Users and Roles in PostgreSQL are very similar. When I set up the FreshPorts database back in mid-2000, I was using PostgreSQL 7.0.3 (that’s my best guess based on my blog entry). I suspect roles were not available then and were introduced with PostgreSQL 8. I am positive someone will correct me if that’s wrong. I now have a need to convert a user into a role, then add users to that role.

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Ideas about moving the rack two floors down to the basement

This is a work in progress. As I make more decisions and receive additional suggestions/advice, I will update this page. I live in an apartment. The Verizon FiOS ONT is outside on the ground floor. I live two floors up. I am considering moving the rack from the bedroom to 7x12ft locked room in the basement. It would share space with my washer and dryer (which is vented to the outside). Why? noise

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Perl @INC – customizing it for FreeBSD

This post is all about creating technical debt. If you accept that, go for it. I’m avoiding porting my FreshPorts scripts into SITEPERL. Why? I’ll migrate them to SITEPERL after BSDCan & PGCon. Right now, I need to get the servers upgraded from Perl 5.24 to Perl 5.26, because 5.24 is deprecated. FreshPorts uses Perl for processing incoming commits and for various administrative backend tasks. Everything on the front end (website) is PHP

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Using mtqq to create a notification network: mosquitto, mqttwarn, hare, and hared

As you read this post, keep in mind that my particular use case of notification on ssh login is not for everyone. It may not appeal to you. In fact, you might find this to be an absolutely ridiculous thing to do. I respect that. I suggest that somewhere within your network there is at least one type of error condition, one urgent situation, one thing that you would like pushed to your

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Book Review: Ed Mastery

I don’t normally offer guest posts here, but on this rare occasion I couldn’t say no. Here’s a guest post from Michael W Lucas. What one of us finds delightful, another person might find loathsome. That’s human nature. I keep reminding myself of this every time people start babbling about the virtues of something I find completely idiotic. Keeping my mouth shut gets me out of many arguments before they start. People learn

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Creating read-only PostgreSQL database users for pg_dump and pg_dumpall

See also mysqldump: Error: ‘Access denied; you need (at least one of) the PROCESS privilege(s) for this operation’ when trying to dump tablespaces. I’m linking this because I use both articles on a regular basis. Sometimes you want a user which can only dump the database, but nothing else. Fortunately, I searched, and found a solution. I’m writing it down so I only have to search this blog. I want the user rsyncer

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Adding IPv6 to an existing server

I am adding IPv6 addresses to each of my servers. This post assumes the server is up and running FreeBSD 11.1 and you already have an IPv6 address block. This does not cover the creation of an IPv6 tunnel, such as that provided by HE.net. This assumes native IPv6. In this post, I am using the IPv6 addresses from the IPv6 Address Prefix Reserved for Documentation (i.e. 2001:DB8::/32). You should use your own

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