Open Source

Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool

Leave a Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

In recent posts: Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Swapping zpools – moving from using main_tank to using data If you have a look over those posts, you’ll see why you never want to downsize a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 removing the zfs labels from an drive which was part of a zpool which is no longer in use destroying the […]

Clear the existing good drive and add it to the new zpool Read More »

x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive

Leave a Comment / Disks, File Systems, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

I was up at 5:30 AM today. I packed the car and headed out. I arrived within the datacenter at about 8:15 or so. By 8:50, I was on IRC and the photos of the FreeBSD racks were uploading. Since I was going there anyway, I did some inventory and disposal work (a decommissioned server, about 25 old HDD, and various bits and pieces). I must say though, I’m not liking this option.

x8dtu: adding in the smaller drive Read More »

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD

Leave a Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

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

Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD Read More »

x8dtu – main ssds: how worn are they?

Leave a Comment / hardware, ZFS / By /

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

x8dtu – main ssds: how worn are they? Read More »

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

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, R730, ZFS / By /

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

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

FreshPorts repos to be converted to subversion – a first draft

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, FreshPorts, Open Source / By /

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

FreshPorts repos to be converted to subversion – a first draft Read More »

Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time

Leave a Comment / Anubis, FreeBSD, Open Source, POW / By /

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

Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time Read More »

What drive did I just remove from the system?

Leave a Comment / hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

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

What drive did I just remove from the system? Read More »

LibreNMS Service health file disabled

Leave a Comment / LibreNMS, Open Source / By /

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

LibreNMS Service health file disabled Read More »

Scroll to Top