Open Source

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD

As foreshadowed in x8dtu – drive problems, I will be visiting a data center soon to replace a 4TB HDD. The replacement HDD arrived last night. It was unceremoniously tossed onto the front porch by the courier. However, it was properly packaged. I’m sure it’s fine. The original idea: put this drive into a host, and write some data to it, to exercise it a bit. As you will soon learn, that is […]

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x8dtu – main ssds: how worn are they?

Let’s look at these two SSDs (full smartctl output appears at the end). pool: zroot state: ONLINE status: Some supported and requested features are not enabled on the pool. The pool can still be used, but some features are unavailable. action: Enable all features using ‘zpool upgrade’. Once this is done, the pool may no longer be accessible by software that does not support the features. See zpool-features(7) for details. scan: scrub repaired

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Adding in a stand-by spare drive for ZFS on FreeBSD

This is a follow up to Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD from two months ago. The replacement for the returned drive has arrived and after sitting for many weeks on my coffee table, it is installed in r730-03. Here it is, as found in /var/log/messages – this host is a Dell R730 which has drive cages allowing me to insert the drive without powering off the host. Jun 30 16:17:15

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FreshPorts repos to be converted to subversion – a first draft

FreshPorts is just over 25 years old. The original repository was cvs. Some of it was converted to subversion in October 2002. That same repo was converted to Git in September 15 Some FreshPorts repos are still on subversion – many are up on Github (19 of them at https://github.com/FreshPorts/) I thank Cosmin Stroe (Chicago) and Caleb L. Power for their efforts in this area. This has been an ongoing process. Latest work

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Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time

On the morning of 1 May 2025, I noticed the FreshPorts production website was under heavy load. For the most part, the database server was running at 100%. The usual load is 7%. Even if you look back 4 weeks, this was highly unusual. I found it was one IP address. I blocked it. The load dropped. It had been going for hours. Time to try Anubis. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 go-anubis

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What drive did I just remove from the system?

So there I was… ready to remove the drive from the system. This was the drive which was giving errors and which had already been replaced. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 Let’s look at the drive I just wiped … I was doing this command: [20:11 r730-03 dvl ~] % sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/gpt/HGST_8CJVT8YE bs=4M Let’s run it again and see which drive LED lights up. Yep, there it is. CTL-C, LED goes

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LibreNMS Service health file disabled

There is no solution here. I’m merely documenting. I use LibreNMS for metrics. Recently, a new item has appeared in the logs: Apr 17 00:00:17 besser librenms[81601]: besser.int.unixathome.org(INFO):Service health file disabled. Checking the code, I found the reference on line 422 of LibreNMS/service.py: Searching for health_file, I found: Which tells me I can set this in my configuration. Searching files: [11:21 besser dvl /usr/local/www/librenms] % grep -ril service_health_file * LibreNMS/service.py app/Console/Commands/HealthCheck.php html/js/lang/en.js lang/en/settings.php

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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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