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.

Eaton 5PX UPS – clear the ‘Replace Battery’ warning

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Three weeks ago, I wrote about Replacing batteries Eaton 5PX – 5PX2200RT & 5PXEBM48RT. Back then, I did not properly replace the front panel before connecting the battery… See also Eaton 5PX console booting screen shots for the followup work. Fixing this requires disconnecting the battery from the UPS. I’m not sure if I can do that live, but I’m not going to try. During this procedure, I will also move two drives […]

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kernel: swap_pager: cannot allocate bio

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This morning, I saw this in my logs: In this post: FreeBSD 14.1 r730-03 Looking in he logs, there wasn’t much useful: Searching online, I found swap_pager: cannot allocate bio so I decided to limit ARC size. I’ve done this before, and recently too.. Here is what I added to /boot/loader.conf: I just picked the same value I was using for another host. The values in the file can using units, such as

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Replacing batteries Eaton 5PX – 5PX2200RT & 5PXEBM48RT

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NOTE: the images in this blog post were broken. As of 2024-12-01 1600 UTC, they are fixed. Sorry about that. Two useful links for future me: https://caniuse.com/?search=HEIC https://urlscan.io/result/31b29ced-bf41-415c-994e-df6ec532cb29/ The time arrived this morning. The batteries were charged up. I had most of the day to myself. It was time to replace the batteries. Elapsed time for this process, according to the photos I took, was about 90 minutes. However, looking at snmpd metrics,

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Optimizing UPS power use when the power goes out

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This post is mostly for myself. I’m just putting my Sunday morning thoughts down for later review and consideration. When Selecting replacements batteries for my Eaton 5PX UPS (5PX2200RT & 5PXEBM48RT), I began to think about: when the power goes off, why can’t I keep using my laptop? Usually, I still have an Internet connection: the ISP isn’t going offline. Why not turn off the two servers in the basement, and anything else

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Selecting replacements batteries for my Eaton 5PX UPS (5PX2200RT & 5PXEBM48RT)

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Both nut and Nagios are telling me: replace my batteries. Fair enough. The UPS (5PX2200RT) and the external battery pack (5PXEBM48RT) were installed and configured with nut four years and two months ago. It’s time. Usually, I buy compatible third party batteries. Looking at video and images, I’m seeing these units use batteries in a pre-packaged plastic shell. I posted to the nut users mailing list and received some fantastic replies. The best

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Loading up an old copy of a PostgreSQL database, zfs snapshots, and sanoid snapshot management

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Sometimes you want to go back to a known good state. And you want to do it quickly, without waiting around. In my case, that’s going to be a zfs snapshot. Today I am preparing to test some code changes so that FreshPorts properly creates a new category. See these recent blog posts for details: Welcome to the new category: filesystems Fixing the category creation code In this post: FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p5 postgresql16-server-16.4 dbclone

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zfs hold / release

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Let’s talk about zfs hold. Based on man zfs-hold: “If a hold exists on a snapshot, attempts to destroy that snapshot by using the zfs destroy command return EBUSY.” Let’s apply that to some FreshPorts snapshots which I don’t want going away: This is your typical FreshPorts website: [15:03 dvl-nginx01 dvl ~] % zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT data02 1.13T 565G 96K none data02/freshports 671G 565G 88K none data02/freshports/jailed 326G 565G

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dma: could not pick up queue file

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see https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-questions/2024-October/005877.html for the full archive. A while back, I changed my FreeBSD jails from using postfix to using dma. I like postfix, but I don’t want to maintain the app in so many locations. dma is less work. I wrote a short blog post about configuring dma and also blogged about replacing postfix with dma. All was well. Except this one log entry which I started to see, on some hosts, not

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Self-hosting Bitwarden / VaultWarden on FreeBSD

6 Comments / FreeBSD, Jails, Open Source, Security, VaultWarden / By /

The time has come for me to consider another application for my TOTP data (think 6-digit codes produced by Google Authenticator or an RSA device. I’ve been using an app called 2STP – I have long liked it. Support for it ended about 7 years ago, yet it continued to slug along on my phone and on my watch. Recently, it stopped working on my watch. That was the tipping point. I decided

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fail2ban – adding to my website to deter abuse

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The type of abuse recently seen on FreshPorts isn’t a big deal. I would ignore it if it was on my own server. However, I’m using a “paid” service and the credits go faster when pillocks do pillocky stuff. While I hope I’ve covered what I’ve done, I’ve been sick with a cold for a week, and helping to look after two < 4 year-olds for two weekends in a row. Perhaps I've

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