If it doesn’t belong anywhere, it belongs here.
I have some odd batteries in use at home. This post will enable me to look them up without opening up the device. Wireless light switch This is used in the server room (aka laundry room in the basement) Cable tester I have had this cable tester for many years. It’s an Ideal LinkMaster. It’s always done well by me. This what the cable tester looks like from the outside.
The odd battery post Read More »
I like boot environments (BE) on FreeBSD. They were especially handy when building the AWS host for FreshPorts, since I had no serial console. I would create a BE saving the current status, then make some changes. I’d mark the current BE as boot once, so I could boot back in the known good BE. Worst case, I could mount the storage onto a rescue EC2 instance and adjust the bootfs value of
Deleting old FreeBSD boot environments Read More »
I recently discovered that you can delete all snapshot from a ZFS filesystem with a single command. It came to me via fortune: You can delete a range of ZFS snapshots (a-z) in multiple ways. The following will delete d and all earlier snapshots: zfs destroy mypool/data@%d To delete d and all later snapshots: zfs destroy mypool/data@d% To delete all dataset snapshots: zfs destroy mypool/data@% Make sure to let ZFS perform a dry
Moving some ZFS filesystems to the ‘trash’ and removing all their snapshots – sanoid Read More »
Today was battery replacement day at my place. The UPS batteries were replaced without downtime. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t downtime. I am not documenting this in real-time. This is post-event analysis. First, I wanted to change the battery replacement date, so I ran acptest on the pfSense server, to which the UPS is connected to. [2.4.5-RELEASE][admin@bast.int.unixathome.org]/root: apctest 2020-08-15 14:51:30 apctest 3.14.14 (31 May 2016) freebsd Checking configuration … sharenet.type = Network &
Unintended shutdown of the #homelab Read More »
I am replacing one zroot with another because of missing binaries and suspect layout. The existing zroot is an old system predating current zroot layouts. This work is being performed on a test system (that link is not safe for young eyes). In this post: FreeBSD 12.1 mfsBSD 12.1 The failed attempt I tried once, and failed, with with old zroot_old and new zroot_new mounted. zroot_new became unusable and I started again. This
Renaming and replacing zroot filesystems using mfsBSD Read More »
Last night I was working on a PostgreSQL function which would take a bunch of rows from one table and update rows in another table. This is part of the FreshPorts packages project. When I ran it from the command line, it worked as expected. When I ran it from within a script, the DELETE part of the function took about 3 minutes, instead of 300ms. Early this morning as I was waking
Just let me check the docs…. Read More »
If you have a blog, or anything online, I’m sure you have received an email saying: Hey, great article, would you mind linking to my website please? A few days later: hey! did you get my email? Then later still: I know you’re busy…. The one I received today was at first annoying but then turned out helpful. I went to that blog post but I couldn’t find a link to Wikipedia anywhere.
link request spammers – sometimes they help Read More »
This sounds slightly political, and it is. Intentionally so. 1. the capacity to recover quickly from difficulties; toughness. “the often remarkable resilience of so many British institutions” 2. the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape; elasticity. “nylon is excellent in wearability and resilience” Christophe Pettus recently said: Right up until you need it, resilience looks like waste If you use ZFS, you should know about this issue. For
Right up until you need it, resilience looks like waste Read More »
2FA has its critics: It’s so unreliable! Phones are so easily hijacked It’s not a lot of added security etc Some of these make assumptions not necessarily in evidence. In this post: FreeBSD 12.1 pam_google_authenticator-1.08 Most of the 2FA I use is time-based one-off passwords (TOTP), as opposed to text messages. These are often 6-digit numbers which change every 30 seconds. These are hard to guess and cannot be intercepted as they reside
Archives are important. When they are public and available for searching, it retains and passes on knowledge. It saves vast amounts of time. Case in point I started the copy-backups-to-tape process today. This appeared on the tape server: Jan 7 19:12:08 r720-01 kernel: (sa0:mps0:0:5:0): 64512-byte tape record bigger than supplied buffer Damn. Do I have a tape problem? Search results When searching for this, I found this FreeBSD Forums post from 2016 where
Archives are important to retain and pass on knowledge Read More »