FreeBSD

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 […]

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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

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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

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Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

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

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?

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

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

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Open Source / By /

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

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

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

Leave a Comment / Bacula, FreeBSD, Open Source, OpenVPN / By /

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

Leave a Comment / DNS, FreeBSD / By /

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]

Leave a Comment / Firewalls/Gateways, FreeBSD, General, Open Source, pf / By /

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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