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.

Booting off the new 5TB drives

This is about FreeBSD 11.1 on my knew server. I recently replaced the 3TB drives with 5TB drives. Along the way, it didn’t boot, the swap was adjusted, I got concerned about power, and there was a brief CAM status: SCSI Status Error scare. Then today, the planned reboot, I started asking questions on Reddit and on Twitter. The booting issue BIOS cannot boot from drives which present only 4096-byte sectors. This is

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Replaced a drive? What about that gmirror swap?

I just swapped out a drive which was involved in a gmirror swap. This is the current status: $ gmirror status Name Status Components mirror/swap DEGRADED da0p2 (ACTIVE) da2p2 (ACTIVE) da3p2 (ACTIVE) da4p2 (ACTIVE) da5p2 (ACTIVE) da9p2 (ACTIVE) da10p2 (ACTIVE) Here is how I can fix that: sudo gmirror forget swap The above tells gmirror to forget about components which are not connected. As you can see here, it makes gmirror happy. $

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subversion via ssh passphrase-less key

In general, passphrase-less ssh keys are a security nightmare. It is similar to leaving the key to your front door in the lock. Anyone stumbling across it has access to your house. Similarly, if someone gets your ssh key, and there is no passphrase on it, they can use that key for anything which grants access to that key. Side note: How can you tell if a given ssh key has a passphrase?

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After replacing 3TB drive with 5TB drive, FreeBSD 10.3 system did not reboot

I started replacing 3TB drives with 5TB drives in a 10 drive raidz3 array on a FreeBSD 10.3 box. I was not sure which drive tray to pull, so I powered off the server, and, one by one, pulled the drive tray, photographed it, and reinserted the drive tray. No changes were made. The first reboot Upon powering up, I was greeted by this (I have typed out the text for search purposes):

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Logging, backups, and newsyslog.conf on FreeBSD

This morning, I was reviewing the logs and noticed these notices in /var/log/messages: I guessed that this was directly related to the zfs replace command I had issued the day before, but I wanted to confirm that. I like to use sudo instead of becoming root. One of the many benefits to this approach is logging. Everything is logged to /var/log/auth.log for later review. However, by the time I went to look, /var/log/auth.log

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Swapping 5TB in, 3TB out

In this power, the server is running FreeBSD 10.3. I am completely and unreasonably biased: ZFS is the best filesystem out there. Do not take my word for it. Ask around. Today, I started a process I’ve been waiting to do for a while. I am replacing the 3TB drives in a 10-drive raidz2 array with 5TB drives. These new drives are faster, I think perhaps cooler, and, more to the point, bigger.

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PostgreSQL – logging to a file

These steps were carried out on FreeBSD 11.0 with PostgreSQL 9.6 (two of my favorite tools). I like logging. I like logging PostgreSQL. With logs, you can see what happened. Without, you can only guess. Setting up logging for PostgreSQL involves several parts, each of which must be completed or else I don’t get what I want. This is not a criticism of PostgreSQL. It’s a feature. I am documenting this because each

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Creating a gmirror swap

This is mostly a note to myself. #### Edit: 2018.09.08 : If you see messages like this: $ sudo gmirror insert swap /dev/da5p2 gmirror: Class not found $ gmirror list -a gmirror: Command ‘list’ not available. You probably need to do this: sudo kldload geom_mirror #### I had these drives: They are involved in this zpool: I decided to create a 6-way mirror for swap: sudo gmirror label -v -b round-robin swap diskid/DISK-653DK7WBFS9Ap2

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slocum

This post has been replaced by a newer one. For reference, the previous post on this server is still available. The most recent change was from 3TB to 5TB drives. For future reference, this is the slocum server, which I use for various jails and services. It is mounted in the 4U chassis mentioned in this post The filesystems, well, some of them: And dmesg:

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