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.

Script for listing the latest ZFS snapshot – starting place for Bacula backups

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This post has it all: backups deduplication snapshots ZFS Bacula ezjail Backups are essential for proper sanity, or at least, a reasonable facsimile. I strongly believe that doing backups right is the only way to backup. Go big or go home. I’ve been converting all my servers to ZFS. I like ZFS for many reasons, and I’m going to list two: data integrity snapshots In this case, instead of backing up the entire […]

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su: _secure_path: /nonexistent/.login_conf is not owned by uid 65534

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This morning, on a FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE #0 r255898 system, I saw this in /var/log/messages: There was nothing around that entry to clue me in. I suspected a cronjob, based upon the time of day. I searched with Google and found only questions. This next command confirms my cronjob suspicion: OK, it’s got to be a cronjob. For the record, uid 65534 is the predefined user nobody

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How Designers Destroyed the World

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I recently watched a great video about design decisions. It features Mike Monteiro speaking at Webstock 13. I particularly liked these quotes: 28:15 – And remember every single time that you, as a designer, make it easier and more pleasant for anyone to find and use information and tools that help people live their lives, you have contributed something important to the world. 40:10 – Every time you let somebody else tell you

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Updating your IPv6 tunnel after an IP address change

1 Comment / DHCP, DNS / By /

I don’t yet have IPv6 native at home. Perhaps Verizon FiOS will provide it soon. In the meantime, I make use of Hurricane Electric, which seems to be everyone’s go-to ISP for tunnels. This post isn’t about creating an IPv6 tunnel. It’s about making sure that tunnel is rebuilt after you have an IP address change. At home, my Verizon FiOS connection has a dynamic IP address. It changes from time to time,

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FreeBSD jails on non-routable IP addresses

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One of my goals with the server I’m setting up is putting non-public services into jails with non-routable IP addresses. Today, I’ve been working on getting PostgreSQL into a jail. The problem I have been grappling with is not putting PostgreSQL into a jail but routing. It took me a while to figure out where I was going wrong. Turns out, it was my NAT rules and, perhaps, my IP address strategy. The

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Accessing FreeBSD Jails over OpenVPN

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With this new server, I am taking a new approach. Each jail will have at least three IP addresses: The public IP4 address, used by internet facing services (e.g. http or https) The public IPv6 address, similar to the above A VPN address, used for system administration and private services (e.g. nrpe) In this article, I will assume you are familiar with ezjail, FreeBSD jails, basic networking, OpenVPN, and ZFS. That is, this

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Bootstrapping a new FreeBSD jail host as an Ansible node

6 Comments / ansible, FreeBSD, Open Source / By /

A few days I configured a new server to be an Ansible node. This will allow my Ansible configuration tool to configure and install software. Installing Ansible and getting it running is not covered by the post. All I show here is how I got a remote server ready to be configured by Ansible. The server in question was running FreeBSD 9.2 with ZFSRoot. Preparing the client for configuration by Ansible Key to

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zuul

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

This is zuul, the server I’ve been setting up to be a new jail host. I like to store away this type of documentation, in case I need it later. The partitions: $ gpart show => 34 976773101 ada0 GPT (465G) 34 6 – free – (3.0k) 40 1024 1 freebsd-boot (512k) 1064 984 – free – (492k) 2048 16777216 2 freebsd-swap (8.0G) 16779264 954204160 3 freebsd-zfs (455G) 970983424 5789711 – free –

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Ansible versus Salt

3 Comments / ansible, FreeBSD, Open Source, salt / By /

Over the past few weeks, I worked with two different configuration tools: Salt and Ansible. I started working with Salt. I quickly created a setup for a Salt server and for a Salt minion. The modules I saw looked great. However, I had consistently had trouble converting from the documentation to a practical usage. The examples provided always seemed to be CLI. Taking that and converting it to a SLS file caused me

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