Open Source

Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

But first, there’s more Right after asking “Anyone running zfsd? Did you do anything in particular to configure it? I just added my first hot-spare to a zpool.”, ivy told me “noooooooo don’t use hot spares!! Keep a cold spare or at least an online device not attached to a pool. otherwise your zpool will randomly decide to attach its hot spare due to a temporary cabling issue or something like that. the […]

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invalid user dan or illegal user dan? Why different messages?

Last night, I wanted to update several hosts which were running sysutils/samdruckerclientshell. I ran csshX host1 host2 host3 … hostn. I didn’t get connected to all the host, so I closed out those screens and tried againg, adding -l dvl to the command. I got connected. Updated the packages, and went on with other tasks. What happened? On the laptop I was using, I was logged in as the user dan, so the

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powerd++: Not always savings

First, let me be clear: I am a fan of powerd++. I use it on all servers in the basement. A recent test shows my gateway does not benefit from it. To determine the range of this graph, I consulted my logs: [11:31 gw01 dvl ~] % sudo grep powerd /var/log/auth.log Mar 25 12:38:12 gw01 sudo[73534]: dvl : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/usr/home/dvl ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/service powerdxx sto Mar 25 12:38:18 gw01 sudo[73544]: dvl

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Get faster OpenVPN on FreeBSD by enabling DCO – easily done

I’ve been configuring a new gateway server for use in my basement data center (home lab). I had recently read about DCO and FreeBSD’s opvn device. DCO (Data Channel Offload) let’s OpenVPN use the encryption features available in many CPUs. In my previous post, I checked; my OpenVPN server and most of the clients are DCO-capable. I decided to try it. I found documentation lacking as to how to use it. I took

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Problems with OpenVPN when server is FreeBSD 14.2 and client is 14.1

After replacing an existing gateway with new hardware, the OpenVPN connections had issues. The clients would connect, but non-trivial amounts of traffic would cause errors. This post contains a workaround, by upgrading the OS. I would like to know the cause. In this post, these are the version in use: FreeBSD 14.2 (for the OpenVPN server and some of the clients) FreeBSD 14.1 (for some of the clients) OpenVPN 2.6.13 (on the server

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Invoking ddclient from dhclient to update 3rd party dynamic dns hosts on FreeBSD

In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 ddclient-3.11.2 Ansible playbook for ddclient: https://github.com/dlangille/ddclient/ forked from https://github.com/hammadrauf/ddclient/ In my previous post, I configured dhclient to setup my Hurricane Electric tunnel and notify HE of same. First attempt: [12:39 gw01 dvl ~] % sudo ddclient [12:47 gw01 dvl ~] % tail /var/log/messages … Mar 6 12:47:50 gw01 ddclient[52929]: WARNING: ” is not a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address Mar 6 12:47:50 gw01 ddclient[52929]: WARNING: found neither IPv4

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Debugging aids for pf firewall rules [on FreeBSD]

It is not often that I need to debug pf firewall rules. Yet, when I do, I cannot remember the commands for what I want to do. What is being blocked First, I want to see the firewall rule numbers in the tcpdump output. I am logging all blocked packets, via pflog0. I can use that to see what is being blocked and by what rule. These are found in my /etc/pf.conf: There

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Configuration of net-mgmt/net-snmp on FreeBSD

I have several posts about net-mgmt/net-snmp – this is the latest. I wrote it back in June and it’s been sitting in drafts ever since. If you read the previous post, you’ll understand why I wrote a new one. In this post: FreeBSD 14.1 net-snmp-5.9.4_6,1 This is the configuration I start with. [dvl@r720-02-nginx01:~] $ cat /usr/local/etc/snmpd.conf agentAddress udp:127.163.0.80:161,tcp:127.163.0.80:161 sysLocation BSD Cabal HQ sysContact dan@langille.org extend nginx /usr/local/etc/snmp/nginx-python3.py extend phpfpmsp /usr/local/etc/snmp/phpfpm-sp When adding auth,

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Converting pgeu-system schedule to HTML

I’ve been using pgeu-system for conference organization since 2000. Once feature I wish it had: export the schedule to HTML. The primary reason for that is to decouple the schedule from the software. That way, the schedules are available on the website when the software is not running. That is, instead of pulling the page from the database, you’re pulling the page from static HTML files. Such a feature is useful should you

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Is deleting empty snapshots faster?

During the 2025-01-22 OpenZFS Production User Call, ‘atomic operations’ was mentioned with respect to ~/tmp/deleting zfs list -r -t snapshot data01/snapshots/deleting > ~/tmp/deleting 2.54s user 48.47s system 99% cpu 51.042 total 50 seconds. That’s OK. 60,000 deletes starting on the 23rd I started the delete. Actually, it’s not 60,000 deletes. It’s one destroy, of 60,000 snapshots. [12:52 r730-03 dvl ~] % time sudo zfs destroy data01/snapshots/deleting@1%60000 After starting the above command, I started

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