I’ve been given a Dell PowerEdge R610. I’ve installed two 30GB SSDs and installed FreeBSD 11 on it. It will become a tape library server. EDIT: 2017.11.29 – the drives, network card, and SAS card have been moved to the R710. The swap: The zpools: Oh, well, that’s a problem. Let’s fix it: There. Fixed. Just. Like. That.™ The filesystems: And dmesg:
I have a system with three tape drives and two tape changers. If one tape library is powered off when the system boots, the device names for the other tape library may be skewed. That is, /dev/sa0 may not be the LTO-4 drive, it will be the SDLT drive. This is not ideal. FreeBSD uses device.hints for this. I have used it before, and for quite some time, however, I learned something new
Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names Read More »
NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version. Please meet x8dtu, a server destined to be the future home of FreshPorts. There is nothing installed here. In short: FreeBSD 11 booting off a mirrored pair of zfsroot SSDs 4.5TB of mirrored ZFS 196612 MB of RAM (yeah, that’s 196GB of RAM) Supermicro X8TDU motherboard Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (two of those, giving 16 CPUs)
Three weeks ago, I thought I had flashed my new LSI SAS 9201-16i. I had not. When I powered up the system via mfsBSD, I could see the device, but during the boot process, there was no splash screen. I now believe this should always be a signal that you have not correctly flashed the card. Finally, I went back to basics. I went back to something I did in photos. I used
Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i – correctly Read More »
This post has been replaced by a newer one. For reference, the previous post on this server is still available. . This server recently moved to a rack-mount chassis. On an interim basis, it contains an LSI SAS 9101-16i. For future reference, this is the slocum server, which I use for various jails and services. The filesystems, well, some of them: And dmesg:
WARNING: This did not work. It succeeded, without error, but the card did not work. There will be a new blog post soon. Yesterday, a new LSI SAS 9201-16i arrived. I bought it on eBay from a supplier in China and paid for expedited shipping. I offered US$250 for their $338 listing and it was accepted. Shipping was another $30. It arrived 6 days later. Why do I need one? The system in
Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i Read More »
The time has come for me to move from shelving to racks. My first thought was to list the various racks over the years. Look below for old photos and links to the posts I lifted them from. Why a rack? In the past, I have always built my own servers, computers, from parts. I always chose tower cases for space and quiet. A large fan and heatsink can be easily mounted in
Moving from shelves to racks Read More »
Let’s try the speed test which comes with Bacula’s btape utility. This is Bacula 7.4.0 on FreeBSD 10.2, with a Dell TL4000 LTO-4 tape library.
Using Bacula’s btape speed test on FreeBSD 10.2 and an LTO-4 tape drive Read More »
For future reference, this is the knew server. It runs a few jails, including Bacula regression testing services. File systems Paritions zpools /var/run/dmesg.boot
I do have a FreeBSD-11 box, cuppy: $ uname -a FreeBSD cuppy.int.unixathome.org 11.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #0 r279394: Sat Feb 28 21:01:21 UTC 2015 dan@cuppy.unixathome.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64 $ That box is used mostly for testing and/or erasing DLT tapes. The current status of that box is not healthy. It’s running fine, but it is not optimal: Let’s fix this. Background Why is one drive upset? Because I installed FreeBSD onto it. Why? I don’t know,
Adding a failed HDD back into a ZFS mirror Read More »