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.

fail2ban – adding to my website to deter abuse

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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kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from x to y packets/sec

For 3 days now, I’ve been seeing these messages. If you search online, it’s usually the result of port scanning. Aug 7 14:05:15 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from 212 to 195 packets/sec Aug 7 14:05:16 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from 219 to 215 packets/sec Aug 7 14:05:17 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from 220 to 193 packets/sec Aug 7 14:05:18 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port

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Replacing postfix with dma + auth

It’s a muggy Friday morning, sitting outside the cafe – it’s tolerable in the shade with a slight breeze and cold iced-latte in a glass. Dogs walking past, lots of pats. It’s time to change most of my hosts from Postfix (my favorite MTA) to dma (in FreeBSD, no install required). I have previously moved most of my jail hosts from Postfix to dma. A few days ago, I changed one of my

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Why are some emails from Charlie Root and others are from root?

It’s another Saturday morning outside the coffee shop. My abundance of free time, without conferences to run, has resulted in mind shattering pondering. Case in point: In this post: FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE Let’s use these two hosts: r730-01 – email is from root nagios03 – email is from Charlie Root What are the differences? First idea My first idea: /etc/password differences. Let’s check that idea: [11:19 r730-01 dvl ~] % grep root /etc/passwd root:*:0:0:Charlie

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What’s this gap in the graphs?

I was checking email this (Friday Jul 19, 2024) morning, over coffee, while many IT folks dealt with Cloudstrike fallout, when I noticed this message from the logs: Jul 19 09:12:18 zuul kernel: [zone: pf states] PF states limit reached I’ve seen that message before. It’s not of high concern. That server contains many services including PGCon, the former BSDCan website, and my blogs. I didn’t give it much concern, although I should

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Where’s my backup?

Nagios was telling me: FILE_AGE WARNING: /usr/home/rsyncer/backups/aws-1/postgresql/freshports.org.dump is 117636 seconds old and 3608113799 bytes That means the FreshPorts backup is more than a day old, and it should have been refreshed by now. OK, let’s go look. I log into the host known as aws-1 and check the files. They look fresh to me: [rsyncer@aws-1 ~/backups/database-backup/postgresql]$ ls -lt total 3525154 -rw-r–r– 1 rsyncer rsyncer 3963 Jul 16 02:14 globals.sql drwxr-xr-x 2 rsyncer rsyncer

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Transferring a VM from one provider to another

Yesterday, I mentioned (in more than one place) that I planned to move a 2017 Digital Ocean droplet over to Azure. As I sit here, with coffee, on the balcony, overlooking lot of green trees, at 7:45 AM, I’m trying to put into words the plan I came up with about 30 minutes ago. In this post: Digital Ocean Microsoft Azure FreeBSD 14.1 Why move? There is no technical issue or dissatisfaction involved

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Updating some jails from FreeBSD 14.0 to FreeBSD 14.1 via mkjail

I’ve updated all my hosts to FreeBSD 14.1 – but not all the jails. I’m going to do some of that today. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 FreeBSD 14.1 mkjail-0.0.4 What’s on r730-03 to update? Full disclosure: mkjail was originally written by Mark Felder, and I joined him in maintaining it. I use it for: Creating jails Updating jails (patching, like freebsd-update fetch install) Upgrading jails (as in going from FreeBSD 14.0 to

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Notes on running net-snmp as non-root

When feasible, I prefer to run things as non-root. A recent commit to net-snmp has made this possible. By its nature, being a new change, it took me some time and help to figure out what needed to be changed. Before doing this yourself, I recommend waiting until the two code reviews mentioned below are committed. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE-p6 net-snmp-5.9.4_2,1 librenms-24.5.0,1 I include commands from different host; please do not be

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