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.

Updating some jails from FreeBSD 14.0 to FreeBSD 14.1 via mkjail

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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

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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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Copying an existing jail to try bind918

Leave a Comment / DNS, FreeBSD, Jails, named, Open Source / By /

bind916 will be EOL in a few months (April 2024). In this post, I’m going to copy an existing jail (running bind916) and configure it to run the new bind. If all goes well, the new jail will replace the old jail. This has an added benefit of effectively renaming the old jail (toiler) to dns2 (my other dns server at home is called dns1). Given the jail runs both dhcpd and named,

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Moving local settings for pg_hba.conf and postgresql.conf out of PGDATA

2 Comments / FreeBSD, Open Source, PostgreSQL / By / /

One of the configuration aspects of FreeBSD I have long liked is the concept of default values which are overridden by the user. For example, /etc/defaults/rc.conf (see The /etc directory). The default values in this file can be overridden by the user with their preferred values in /etc/rc.conf (or /etc/rc.conf.local, and other locations if you so choose (search for rc_conf_files)). With that approach in mind, I wanted to do the same thing with

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Adding a new user to my Time Capsule – on ZFS with Samba

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I have another laptop I want to backup using my Time Capsule jail. Here are the step I used. Create a Unix User I have no idea if I need to do this. But I did. But now, I’m thinking, it is not required, at all. But read on, I think I’ll show you where I use it. [21:56 tm dvl ~] % sudo adduser Username: dvl-pro04 Full name: For backing up pro04

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OK, we got a Time Machine on ZFS on FreeBSD. So what. Can we restore from it?

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I have written recently about creating a ZFS-based Time Machine on FreeBSD. Yesterday, I did my first restore from this instance. Surprise. It worked. Please move along. Nothing to see here. Just photos. The motivation: I’m replacing one MacBook with another. Some details here on Twitter. Edit – 2024-02-22 After I messed up when renaming a user account, I restored from backup. Since my Time Machine is only available via my VPN, I

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Using powerd++ to reduce power consumption on a Dell R730

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Yesterday, I changed CPUs in my main server. That server builds packages, is the database server for dev, test, and stage freshports, amongst other things. It is a generalized server. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 powerdxx-0.4.4_1 Dell R730 2x E5-2699 v3 CPUs As folks started reading my tweets, crest pointed out that powerd++ may help. SPKaniu also mentioned cycling down. Straight out of ports After installing powerd++, I tried running it: [0:31 r730-01

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Spreading thermal paste – replacing Dell R730 CPUs

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On Sunday, I replaced the CPUs in r730-01 with something quite a bit more powerful. I have been thinking about doing this since before this September blog post: Can I really swap CPU and RAM between my Dell R730 servers? The answer was: Yes, I can. See also the next post: Using powerd++ to reduce power consumption on a Dell R730 In this post: FreeBSD 14 LibreNMS 24.1.0 2x E5-2650LV3 (old CPUs) 2x

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