hardware

Getting into the CLI for a Unifi switch

I’m writing this down so I can find it later. The management IP address on my Unifi US-16-XG is wrong. I’m going to change it via a combination of the controller and the CLI. Let’s hope this works. Hope? Why hope? Unifi switches are designed to be managed via the webgui (i.e. their controller). I’m sure this will also work on my US-48 switch too. Get connected and get in I’ve done this […]

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R710

I’ve been given a Dell PowerEdge 710. I’ve installed two 30GB SSDs, installed FreeBSD 11 on them, and added four 500 GB SSDs. It will become a tape library server, replacing the R610 which will no longer be used. Some of the hardware came from the R610. The zpools: The filesystems: And dmesg:

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R710 – getting the drives ready

I recently installed 6 SSDs into an R710. In this post, I will describe what I did to the empty SSDs before I started using them. short test I ran a short test on each one of the drives. I already had smartctl. $ sudo smartctl -t short /dev/da0 smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [FreeBSD 11.1-RELEASE-p1 amd64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF OFFLINE IMMEDIATE AND SELF-TEST

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Converting a Dell R710 into a ZFS-based FreeBSD 11.1 tape library bacula-sd

If you’ve read even a little of what I’ve written, the following points will not come as a surprise: I like FreeBSD I’m a fan of backups I use Bacula I like ZFS I have tape libraries In this post, I will cover all of the above and more. Photos will be included. New gear Full disclosure: the following links contain my Amazon referrer code. On the left is the ICY DOCK 2.5″

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x8dtu

NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version. The older post is still available This is x8dtu (named after the SuperMicro motherboard). This is the new FreshPorts server. 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) NOTE: this post replaces

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Moving boot from one zpool to another

I’ve been having boot issues with a server containing 20 HDD, all behind HBAs. I have decided to start booting off SSDs. In that previous blog post, there was much speculation about where to mount the new drives, etc. In the meantime, I came up with a solution which did not involve magnets and used a pair of INTEL 730 SSDs I had in another chassis. Let’s start with how I configured those

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Moving from zroot from one zpool to another

Please also see Moving boot from one zpool to another and Adding a zroot pool to an existing system. On my 20x HDD system at home (also known as knew), I am having a recurring problem with booting. This is also the same system mentioned in my FreeBSD Forums thread about some CAM errors. Side note: I now think those CAM errors may be temperature related.  EDIT: 2018-12-29: They were not temperature related.

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Booting off the new 5TB drives

This is about FreeBSD 11.1 on my knew server. I recently replaced the 3TB drives with 5TB drives. Along the way, it didn’t boot, the swap was adjusted, I got concerned about power, and there was a brief CAM status: SCSI Status Error scare. Then today, the planned reboot, I started asking questions on Reddit and on Twitter. The booting issue BIOS cannot boot from drives which present only 4096-byte sectors. This is

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