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.

When mv can’t mv – Let’s Encrypt

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Last night I uploaded my collect-certs code to Gitub. Today, I discovered a problem with invoking mv on multiple files. The code in question is around lines 40-42 and I’m including some of my debugging code here: When I run this script, I see this output: Of note, that’s two errors: one from mv and the second from rmdir. Now, if I manually run that command: /bin/mv -f /var/db/certs-for-rsync/tmp/example.com/* /var/db/certs-for-rsync/certs/example.com … it works. […]

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acme.sh: getting free SSL certificates – installation configuration on FreeBSD

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This blog post describes my Let’s Encrypt solution which uses acme.sh and dns-01 challenges to obtain SSL certificates. If you are using HTTP challenges, this post might still be useful, but your configuration will differ slightly. Let’s Encrypt is a certificate authority which has become wildly popular since it was launched in April 2016 (just a short 14 months ago). Why so popular? It provides a secure way to offer free SSL certificates.

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Configuring my BIND/named DNS servers to operate from a hidden master via VPN for Let’s Encrypt

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What is a hidden DNS master? If you need to ask that, this is not the blog post for you. This post assumes you already know how to configure DNS and just want ideas for your own hidden master. It also assumes the networking, VPN, and firewall are pre-configured for this. This blog post is mostly about named/BIND. For the record, I am using bind99-9.9.10P1. In my previous blog post, you’ll see how

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Creating a TXT only nsupdate connection for Let’s Encrypt

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I’m in the process of designing my own centralized Let’s Encrypt solution. It was Peter Wemm’s blog post about Let’s Encrypt in the FreeBSD cluster which got me started down this road. My rough notes are this this gist. This blog post assumes you are already familiar with Let’s Encrypt and especially with the dns-01 challenge. This previous post might also be useful. In this post, I’ll show you have to generate a

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My first big Tarsnap backup

2 Comments / Backups, Open Source, tarsnap / By /

NOTE: I wrote this post nearly two years ago, in May 2015. It has been sitting ignored and unloved in my Drafts. I’ve just published it today. I’m big on backups and I use Bacula. I have about 18 TB on about 350 tapes and about 10 TB of backups on disk. I want more. I last used Tarsnap back in July 2010 (I know that because I found the old Tarsnap registration

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Accessing your Time Capsule when on a different subnet

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Last night, when I got my FreeBSD & ZFS based Time Capsule running, I had to connect my laptop to the same network as the server in question. This is not ideal. My usual work flow: connect to the WIFI, then connect to the VPN, then I get access to those services. These are different subnets, so the Netatalk broadcast does not traverse the switch. It stays inside so my laptop does not

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Creating an Apple Time Capsule using FreeBSD & ZFS

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First, all credit goes to Mark Felder’s blog post upon which this is based. You can buy an Apple Time Capsule (I did) to back up your Mac. Now that I have two MacBook’s, I have run out of space, so now I want to backup to ZFS. By backing up to my ZFS filesystem: I am no longer constrained to the capacity of a single disk I can backup my backups to

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x8dtu

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NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version. The older post is still available This is x8dtu (named after the Supermicro motherboard). This will be the new FreshPorts server. In short: FreeBSD 11 booting off a mirrored pair of zfsroot SSDs 4.5TB of mirrored ZFS 196612 MB of RAM (yeah, that’s 196GB of RAM) Supermicro X8TDU motherboard Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (two of those, giving 16 CPUs) NOTE: this post

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r610

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I’ve been given a Dell PowerEdge R610. I’ve installed two 30GB SSDs and installed FreeBSD 11 on it. It will become a tape library server. EDIT: 2017.11.29 – the drives, network card, and SAS card have been moved to the R710. The swap: The zpools: Oh, well, that’s a problem. Let’s fix it: There. Fixed. Just. Like. That.™ The filesystems: And dmesg:

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Pentabarf email tokens

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As found at: http://web.archive.org/web/20160309091535/http://pentabarf.org/Email Variables The following variables may be used in the text and subject of the mail {{name}} The name of the recipient. {{person_id}} The person-id of the recipient. {{conference_acronym}} The acronym of the conference if the recipients are conference specific. {{conference_title}} The title of the current conference if the recipients are conference specific. {{email}} The email address of the recipient {{event_title}} A comma-separated list of the events in question.

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