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.

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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Adding another pair of drives to a zpool mirror on FreeBSD

1 Comment / DELL, Disks, FreeBSD, General, hardware, Open Source, R730 / By /

Today, I’m ready to adding two recently obtained 12T spinning disks to r730-03. This host is the work-horse which houses all the main backups and database regression testing. It also hosts my newly-created but not yet-functional graylog jail. I will be following a previous post about adding drives because I don’t want to remember these things. They occur infrequently enough that documenting it is a good idea. In this post: FreeBSD 14 The

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r720-02

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I’ve been given a Dell PowerEdge 720, which will be known as r720-02. It sits in a datacenter in New York, New York, and acts as a FreshPorts node. For example, if you’ve ever accessed dev, test, or stage [.freshports.org], then you’ve accessed this host. Partitions zpools The zpools: Filesystems The filesystems: dmesg And dmesg:

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