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.

mfituil exploration

Leave a Comment / hardware / By /

When I couldn’t see any tape library associated with my SAS card, I decided to play with mifutil in case that provides any useful information. # mfiutil -u 0 show adapter mfi0 Adapter: Product Name: PERC 6/E Adapter Serial Number: 1122334455667788 Firmware: 6.2.0-0013 RAID Levels: JBOD, RAID0, RAID1, RAID5, RAID6, RAID10, RAID50 Battery Backup: not present NVRAM: 32K Onboard Memory: 256M Minimum Stripe: 8K Maximum Stripe: 1M # mfiutil -u 0 show firmware […]

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Oh! There’s my missing tape drive!

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Yesterday and today, none of my Bacula copy-to-tape jobs completed because my tape drive was missing. Today, I reseated all the cables, and power cycled the tape library. In my ssh session, I did this: $ sudo camcontrol devlist <ATA TOSHIBA DT01ACA3 ABB0> at scbus0 target 2 lun 0 (da0,pass0) <ATA TOSHIBA DT01ACA3 ABB0> at scbus0 target 10 lun 0 (da1,pass1) <ATA TOSHIBA DT01ACA3 ABB0> at scbus0 target 11 lun 0 (da2,pass2) <ATA

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tape01 – old server; new purpose

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This is tape01, the server to which the DELL TL4000 will be attached. At one time, it was my gateway/firewall/router. Of interest is the SAS card. You can see photos here. $ grep mfi /var/log/messages Dec 30 14:48:02 tape01 kernel: mfi0: <Dell PERC 6> port 0xd000-0xd0ff mem 0xfbec0000-0xfbefffff,0xfbe80000-0xfbebffff irq 19 at device 0.0 on pci3 Dec 30 14:48:02 tape01 kernel: mfi0: Using MSI Dec 30 14:48:02 tape01 kernel: mfi0: Megaraid SAS driver Ver

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OSX Mail crashes when using TunnelBlick and setting DNS/WINS

Leave a Comment / Apple, OpenVPN / By /

I encounter edge cases. It’s not fun. This particular situation caused OXS Mail.app to crash when using a VPN. The outline This particular edge case involved the following: OSX 10.11.1 (15B42) Tunnelblick 3.5.5 (build 4270.4461) Mail.app When running Mail.app, it would crash within 5-10 seconds. The full dump of the crash has been sent to Apple, multiple times. Also of note: My mail server is not at home… it’s out there on the

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Installing net-mgmt/net-snmpd and getting it running

3 Comments / FreeBSD, snmp / By /

NOTE: If you are looking to configure net-mgmt/net-snmp for the first time, the latest article is Configuration of net-mgmt/net-snmp on FreeBSD. NOTE: IF YOU WANT TO GET IT WORKING, skip down to The Recipe. See also net-mgmt/net-snmpd wants /snmp/snmpd.conf for later versions of net-snmpd. I want to measure more stuff. I have catci running on some machines, but I have long neglected those stats. In response to my recent post on the FreeBSD

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Deleting files from /usr/, breaking your system, then recovering

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

Yes, this was not fun. I took some notes, but not everything. Please read the notes if you plan on doing these foolish things. I was cleaning up /usr/src on a host which does not hold src. I looked and found: It was there that I knew I’d done the wrong thing. Trying snapshots Let’s look for snapshots, find one from a few minutes ago, and rollback to that. $ zfs list -t

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Swapping disks in a zpool

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I’m using FreeBSD 10.2-RC2 here, with a bunch of HDD. Here are the current pools: The degraded music pool contains a drive I will be replacing later in this post. But first, I want to replace a mis-matched drive in the benchmarking pool. I noticed that when I saw this output: The serial number on line 19 is of a different format. I suspected I was using different size drives because I knew

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Smart quotes are not so smart: net-snmp-config –create-snmpv3-user for LibreNMS

4 Comments / FreeBSD, LibreNMS, snmp / By /

NOTE: If you are looking to configure net-mgmt/net-snmp for the first time, the latest article is Configuration of net-mgmt/net-snmp on FreeBSD. I wasted a few hours today trying to figure out why special characters in passwords were causing problems. I was chasing the wrong problem. Conclusion: smart quotes are dumb. Full disclosure: I should have seen the problem. The problem is not with LibreNMS. Here is my procedure for creating an snmp read-only

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CAM status: ATA Status Error READ_DMA48 Error 5, Retries exhausted

Leave a Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware / By /

This turned up this morning: Aug 5 05:10:04 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): READ_DMA48. ACB: 25 00 d0 c4 6e 40 57 00 00 00 60 00 Aug 5 05:10:04 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error Aug 5 05:10:04 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): ATA status: 51 (DRDY SERV ERR), error: 40 (UNC ) Aug 5 05:10:04 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): RES: 51 40 f0 c4 6e 57 57 00 00 40 00 Aug 5 05:10:04

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