hardware

Dell R720 flashing Dell PERC H710 mini into IT mode

Dell PowerEdge Servers are common in #homelab use. The hardware gets sold after it goes out of warranty and they get dumped. Most of the disk cards in these servers come flashed for use with RAID and RAID only. Never use a RAID card with ZFS. Always give ZFS direct access to the drives. I won’t go into the details because the reasons why are easily researched. These cards usually arrive in IR […]

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PDU setttings

This post documents the PDU settings so I know what is plugged in where and the delay they have on power up. pdu1 – before pdu1 – outlet 1 – r720-01 pdu1 – outlet 2 – knew pdu1 – outlet 3 – slocum pdu1 – outlet 7 – LTO4 tape library pdu1 – after pdu2 – before pdu2 – outlet 1 – r720-01 Missing, I can’t find that one. pdu2 – outlet 2

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laptop hits load averages: 407.41 128.53 49.18 during start up

I’m not complaining. It’s just very amazing how much work a laptop does to start up. As soon as I can get a terminal session I start: [dan@air01:~] $ w 18:13 up 3 mins, 11 users, load averages: 164.29 42.91 15.80 USER TTY FROM LOGIN@ IDLE WHAT dan console – 31Dec19 230days – dan s000 – 18:12 – -bash dan s001 – 18:12 – -bash dan s002 – 18:12 – -bash dan s003

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replacing an existing zroot with a proper zroot

I wrote this post late one night while pondering how to solve this problem. I may have solved it with much less effort. I want to copy a zroot from old drives to new drives. The new drives are in a test box of mine. Once the new drives are configured, I will replace the existing mirror with them. Not shown here, I have already installed FreeBSD 12.1 on the new drives. I

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tape01

This is a small desktop / short tower case which is connected to a couple of tape libraries. This post replaces a previous post. Partitions [dan@tape01:~] $ gpart show => 40 5860533088 ada0 GPT (2.7T) 40 1024 1 freebsd-boot (512K) 1064 984 – free – (492K) 2048 4194304 2 freebsd-swap (2.0G) 4196352 5856335872 3 freebsd-zfs (2.7T) 5860532224 904 – free – (452K) => 40 5860533088 ada1 GPT (2.7T) 40 1024 1 freebsd-boot (512K)

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knew

This post has been replaced by a newer post. For future reference, this is the knew server … oh wait, I think it’s this server which is was mounted in the 4U chassis mentioned in this post. It runs a few jails, including Bacula regression testing services. It is now mounted in a SuperChassis 846E16-R1200B This is the previous post for this system configuration. Photos of the assembly. File systems Paritions zpools Those

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zpool degraded – one drive missing from system

I rebooted knew yesterday for upgrades. When it came back, the main storage zpool was degraded: Is the drive alive? The drive is not listed at all in /var/run/dmesg.boot. I keep a list of the expected drives in /etc/periodic.conf, for use by a Nagios check: [dan@knew:~] $ /usr/sbin/sysrc -nf /etc/periodic.conf daily_status_smart_devices /dev/da22 /dev/da21 /dev/da20 /dev/da19 /dev/da18 /dev/da17 /dev/da16 /dev/da15 /dev/da14 /dev/da13 /dev/da12 /dev/da11 /dev/da10 /dev/da9 /dev/da8 /dev/da7 /dev/da6 /dev/da5 /dev/da4 /dev/da3 /dev/da2 /dev/da1

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Creating a drive-bay map

When the time comes to replace a drive, it is very nice to know which drives is missing. I created this drive map to help me figure out which drive disappeared. I created this drive-bay map using a combination of: zpool status sesutil map lsblk camcontrol /var/run/dmesg.boot I have not included /var/run/dmesg.boot here. If you click on this image, you’ll see a larger version which is easier to read. I went through sesutil

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slocum

This post has been replaced by a new one. For reference, the previous post on this server is still available. FYI, this server is named after Joshua Slocum, who was the first person to sail single-handedly around the world. This server was upgraded on Feb 2 2019. Only the storage persisted. Everything else was upgraded. The hardware M/B – Supermicro X9DRE-TF+ RAM – 128GB composed of 8x 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz 21300 ECC/REG CPU

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