FreeBSD

After replacing 3TB drive with 5TB drive, FreeBSD 10.3 system did not reboot

1 Comment / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, HBA, Open Source, ZFS / By /

I started replacing 3TB drives with 5TB drives in a 10 drive raidz3 array on a FreeBSD 10.3 box. I was not sure which drive tray to pull, so I powered off the server, and, one by one, pulled the drive tray, photographed it, and reinserted the drive tray. No changes were made. The first reboot Upon powering up, I was greeted by this (I have typed out the text for search purposes): […]

After replacing 3TB drive with 5TB drive, FreeBSD 10.3 system did not reboot Read More »

Logging, backups, and newsyslog.conf on FreeBSD

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, syslog / By /

This morning, I was reviewing the logs and noticed these notices in /var/log/messages: I guessed that this was directly related to the zfs replace command I had issued the day before, but I wanted to confirm that. I like to use sudo instead of becoming root. One of the many benefits to this approach is logging. Everything is logged to /var/log/auth.log for later review. However, by the time I went to look, /var/log/auth.log

Logging, backups, and newsyslog.conf on FreeBSD Read More »

Swapping 5TB in, 3TB out

1 Comment / Disks, File Systems, FreeBSD, hardware, ZFS / By /

In this power, the server is running FreeBSD 10.3. I am completely and unreasonably biased: ZFS is the best filesystem out there. Do not take my word for it. Ask around. Today, I started a process I’ve been waiting to do for a while. I am replacing the 3TB drives in a 10-drive raidz2 array with 5TB drives. These new drives are faster, I think perhaps cooler, and, more to the point, bigger.

Swapping 5TB in, 3TB out Read More »

Creating a gmirror swap

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, gmirror / By /

This is mostly a note to myself. #### Edit: 2018.09.08 : If you see messages like this: $ sudo gmirror insert swap /dev/da5p2 gmirror: Class not found $ gmirror list -a gmirror: Command ‘list’ not available. You probably need to do this: sudo kldload geom_mirror #### I had these drives: They are involved in this zpool: I decided to create a 6-way mirror for swap: sudo gmirror label -v -b round-robin swap diskid/DISK-653DK7WBFS9Ap2

Creating a gmirror swap Read More »

Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Open Source, tape library / By /

I have a system with three tape drives and two tape changers. If one tape library is powered off when the system boots, the device names for the other tape library may be skewed. That is, /dev/sa0 may not be the LTO-4 drive, it will be the SDLT drive. This is not ideal. FreeBSD uses device.hints for this. I have used it before, and for quite some time, however, I learned something new

Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names Read More »

Server freeze – 2014.12.14

Leave a Comment / Server Freeze / By /

The knew server is ‘frozen’ again. This has been happening daily at about O301 UTC each night. See my Twitter feed for background. In this post I will include details as I progress through the data. The server in question is knew (yes, that’s the hostname). dtrace hotkernel I left this running in an ssh session and pressed control-C this morning: [root@knew:/usr/share/dtrace/toolkit] # ./hotkernel >> /var/tmp/hotkernel ^C ssh login loop It was suggested

Server freeze – 2014.12.14 Read More »

system freezes up with lots of sonewconn Listen queue overflow

Leave a Comment / Server Freeze / By /

I recently added 10 new HDD to a system which already had 10 HDD (now a total of 20). The HDD are split into two zpools: $ zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT system 27T 22.1T 4.93T – 19% 81% 1.00x ONLINE – tank_data 45.2T 26.3T 19.0T – 37% 58% 1.00x ONLINE – zoomzoom 436G 9.67G 426G – 6% 2% 1.00x ONLINE – The zoomzoom zpool is

system freezes up with lots of sonewconn Listen queue overflow Read More »

Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i

2 Comments / Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, HBA / By /

WARNING: This did not work. It succeeded, without error, but the card did not work. There will be a new blog post soon. Yesterday, a new LSI SAS 9201-16i arrived. I bought it on eBay from a supplier in China and paid for expedited shipping. I offered US$250 for their $338 listing and it was accepted. Shipping was another $30. It arrived 6 days later. Why do I need one? The system in

Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i Read More »

leapsecond file (‘/var/db/ntpd.leap-seconds.list’): expired less than N days ago

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

After upgrading all my servers to FreeBSD 10.3 last weekend, I started to see these messages in the logs: Aug 3 21:15:19 slocum ntpd[29456]: leapsecond file (‘/var/db/ntpd.leap-seconds.list’): expired less than 64 days ago I found this post which suggested running service ntpd fetch but that did not fix it. While debugging the issue, I added ntp_leapfile_fetch_verbose=”YES” to /etc/rc.conf, which provides more output to the fetch command: $ sudo service ntpd fetch ntp_src_leapfile version

leapsecond file (‘/var/db/ntpd.leap-seconds.list’): expired less than N days ago Read More »