FreeBSD

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

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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 […]

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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.

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Doing a bit of stress work on a new HDD

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

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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

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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

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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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Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

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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?

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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

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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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