Author name: Dan Langille

Installing packages from a custom FreeBSD repository

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, pkgng, poudriere / By /

One of the great things about FreeBSD is the poudriere tool. With it, you can create your own set of customized packages for installation on your server. Today, I will be installing packages in a FreeBSD 9.2 jail. Although I am installing in a jail, the same steps apply to any FreeBSD 9.2 host. In this post, I will cover how to deliver the packages produced by poudriere. I have already written about […]

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Using poudriere to create a custom FreeBSD repository for package installation

1 Comment / ezjail, FreeBSD, Jails, pkgng, poudriere / By /

I just showed you how I installed ezjail 3.3 on FreeBSD 9.2 and how it uses ZFS for each jail. Today I’m writing about using poudriere to create custom packages for use by pkng. In this post, I will be creating packages on a FreeBSD 9.2 server. Those packages are for running Bacula on FreeBSD 9.2. To accomplish this, we will need: A list of ports to install for running Bacula. In poudriere

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Installing ezjail 3.3 on FreeBSD 9.2 using ZFS

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Today I will be installing ezjail 3.3 on a FreeBSD 9.2 system. I will give an overview of the installation and go straight to the configuration of the first jail. As I type this, I’m looking back at my old notes from 2008. Installation I installed ezjail with this command: pkg install ezjail Configuration Enable ezjail by adding this command to /etc/rc.conf: ezjail_enable=”YES” This system is configured with ZFS and each jail will

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Older versions of Bacula – copy/migrate has limit of 99 jobs

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Last night I started to catch up on copying jobs from disk to tape. There were about 420 incremental jobs waiting. I started my CopyToTape-Inc job, and it queued up 417 jobs: The next morning, all jobs had completed, but there were still jobs left to be copied over (as determined by my magical Bacula portal). I ran the job again. Let them finish. Still more jobs left to job. I talked on

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Backup speed

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It’s little things like this which improve the copying of backups to tape. Speed. Each of those Volumes are 5GB in size. The tape drive takes about about 2-4 minutes per 5GB to write it to tape. Between the end of IncrAuto-4150 and the end of IncrAuto-1455, the tape drive wrote 20GB in about 9 minutes. That’s roughly 2GB/minute or about 37MB/s.

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Bacula btape test of Compaq Storage Works MSL5026 Library

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This output is a Bacula btape test of the library mentioned in this post. $ sudo btape -c /usr/local/etc/bacula/bacula-sd.conf /dev/nsa0 Tape block granularity is 1024 bytes. btape: butil.c:290 Using device: “/dev/nsa0” for writing. btape: btape.c:477 open device “DTL03” (/dev/nsa0): OK *test === Write, rewind, and re-read test === I’m going to write 10000 records and an EOF then write 10000 records and an EOF, then rewind, and re-read the data to verify that

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Using the Compaq Storage Works MSL5026 Library

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I am fortunate to receive donations. In the early days, it was a 386 desktop. Later, it was SCSI drives. Recently, it’s been tape libraries. A Bacula user in Europe donated an Overland DLT-8000 tape library in 2012 and paid for shipping to me. At BSDCan 2013, I was fortunate to pick up an Compaq StorageWorks MSL5026 SDLT tape library and it has sat unused. It’s dead Jim A few weeks back, the

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Looking for a tape library

4 Comments / Backups / By /

The current situation The tape library I am using now is a DLT-8000 with a 15-cartridge magazine. Until a few weeks ago, it’s been quite reliable. But now, the drive inside it is not performing well. It’s throwing drive faults and failing to write everything to the tape (i.e. what we read back is smaller than what we wrote). I have two replacement DLT-8000 drives and I’ve tried both. Neither of them are

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daily run output not parsing smartd output correctly

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I’ve noticed that the smartd output has changed. It’s not parsing the results correctly. Security check: (output mailed separately) Checking for denied zone transfers (AXFR and IXFR): Scrubbing of zfs pools: skipping scrubbing of pool ‘system’: last scrubbing is 3 days ago, threshold is set to 7 days Backing up pkgng database: SMART status: Checking health of /dev/ada0: OK Checking health of /dev/ada1: OK Checking health of /dev/da0: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION

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Bacula: indexing on media.lastwritten

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I wrote this nearly a year ago, but did not publish it then. Tonight I found this query running, so I tried an explain analyse on it: That’s 10 seconds. Add an index: bacula=# create index media_lastwritten_idx on media(lastwritten); CREATE INDEX Run the query again: Forgive my math, but that’s over 10,000 times faster now.

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