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.

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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Replacing a failed drive in ZFS on FreeBSD

1 Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, Open Source, ZFS / By /

I’m using FreeBSD 10.2-RC2. One of my new hard 3TB drives was acting up. I removed it and sent it off to be replaced. In the meantime, I received some 5TB drives and I added one of them into the existing vdev of the zpool. First, I partitioned the drive much like the other drives in the system. In my case, this was: $ sudo gpart create -s gpt da0 da0 created $

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smartctl -t long /dev/allthedrives

2 Comments / FreeBSD, smartctl / By /

I took delivery of another 10 x Toshiba PH3500U-1I72 5TB drives yesterday. They are installed into the latest server (varm). This sever also contains 10x Toshiba DT01ACA300 3TB drives. Last night I wrote a wee script to start long tests on each of them. I was able to extract a list of the hard drives through this command: I suspect I could have done similar with ls /dev/da*. With the above list, I

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smartd: ATA error count increased from 0 to 1

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

I noticed this in /var/log/messages today: Jul 30 13:25:21 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): READ_DMA48. ACB: 25 00 b0 51 95 40 68 00 00 00 40 00 Jul 30 13:25:21 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): CAM status: ATA Status Error Jul 30 13:25:21 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): ATA status: 51 (DRDY SERV ERR), error: 40 (UNC ) Jul 30 13:25:21 knew kernel: (ada0:ata0:0:0:0): RES: 51 40 b8 51 95 68 68 00 00 38 00 Jul 30

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smartd: Device: 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors

Leave a Comment / Disks, hardware, Open Source, smartctl, ZFS / By /

I noticed these messages this morning, on the new server: $ grep smartd /var/log/messages Jul 25 11:35:29 varm smartd[813]: Device: /dev/da15 [SAT], 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Jul 25 11:35:29 varm smartd[813]: Device: /dev/da15 [SAT], 10 Offline uncorrectable sectors Jul 25 12:05:28 varm smartd[813]: Device: /dev/da15 [SAT], 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Jul 25 12:35:29 varm smartd[813]: Device: /dev/da15 [SAT], 8 Currently unreadable (pending) sectors Jul 25 13:05:29 varm smartd[813]: Device: /dev/da15 [SAT],

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Nagios check_ntp_time failed with ntpd on FreeBSD 10.2

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

As I was setting up the new varm server, one of the Nagios checks I included was check_ntp_time. It comes standard with nagios-plugins. The check was reporting NTP CRITICAL: Offset unknown. Running the check from the command line showed: [dan@webserver:/usr/local/libexec/nagios] $ ./check_ntp_time -4 -H varm NTP CRITICAL: Offset unknown| Running the check with a timeout showed: [dan@webserver:/usr/local/libexec/nagios] $ ./check_ntp_time -4 -H varm -t 1 CRITICAL – Socket timeout after 1 seconds I checked

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Configuring unbound on FreeBSD 10.x

Leave a Comment / DNS, FreeBSD, Open Source, pkgng, unbound / By /

NOTE: I found out these settings do not persist after a reboot. Annoying. I’ll get back to that soon for a fix. EDIT 2021-05-05: On more recent FreeBSD, say 12.2, to disable resolvconf.conf, do this, as provided by [dvl@r720-02:~] $ cat /etc/resolvconf.conf resolvconf=NO [dvl@r720-02:~] $ The above is documented in man 8 resolvconf.conf (search for disable). I now return you to the original article. Today I was setting up my new server, varm,

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New server build – the parts list

22 Comments / hardware / By /

NOTES: All prices exclude taxes and shipping, unless otherwise specified. When a price indicates delivered, it includes delivery and taxes. All prices are in USD. Yes, it’s time to build a new server because my current backup server is running out of space. This server will be used for more than just backups. What else, I’m not sure, but the servers it will replace also does these tasks (sorted by my estimate order

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