FreeBSD

Using the Compaq Storage Works MSL5026 Library

I am fortunate to receive donations. In the early days, it was a 386 desktop. Later, it was SCSI drives. Recently, it’s been tape libraries. A Bacula user in Europe donated an Overland DLT-8000 tape library in 2012 and paid for shipping to me. At BSDCan 2013, I was fortunate to pick up an Compaq StorageWorks MSL5026 SDLT tape library and it has sat unused. It’s dead Jim A few weeks back, the […]

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daily run output not parsing smartd output correctly

I’ve noticed that the smartd output has changed. It’s not parsing the results correctly. Security check: (output mailed separately) Checking for denied zone transfers (AXFR and IXFR): Scrubbing of zfs pools: skipping scrubbing of pool ‘system’: last scrubbing is 3 days ago, threshold is set to 7 days Backing up pkgng database: SMART status: Checking health of /dev/ada0: OK Checking health of /dev/ada1: OK Checking health of /dev/da0: === START OF INFORMATION SECTION

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Script for listing the latest ZFS snapshot – starting place for Bacula backups

This post has it all: backups deduplication snapshots ZFS Bacula ezjail Backups are essential for proper sanity, or at least, a reasonable facsimile. I strongly believe that doing backups right is the only way to backup. Go big or go home. I’ve been converting all my servers to ZFS. I like ZFS for many reasons, and I’m going to list two: data integrity snapshots In this case, instead of backing up the entire

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FreeBSD jails on non-routable IP addresses

One of my goals with the server I’m setting up is putting non-public services into jails with non-routable IP addresses. Today, I’ve been working on getting PostgreSQL into a jail. The problem I have been grappling with is not putting PostgreSQL into a jail but routing. It took me a while to figure out where I was going wrong. Turns out, it was my NAT rules and, perhaps, my IP address strategy. The

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Accessing FreeBSD Jails over OpenVPN

With this new server, I am taking a new approach. Each jail will have at least three IP addresses: The public IP4 address, used by internet facing services (e.g. http or https) The public IPv6 address, similar to the above A VPN address, used for system administration and private services (e.g. nrpe) In this article, I will assume you are familiar with ezjail, FreeBSD jails, basic networking, OpenVPN, and ZFS. That is, this

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Bootstrapping a new FreeBSD jail host as an Ansible node

A few days I configured a new server to be an Ansible node. This will allow my Ansible configuration tool to configure and install software. Installing Ansible and getting it running is not covered by the post. All I show here is how I got a remote server ready to be configured by Ansible. The server in question was running FreeBSD 9.2 with ZFSRoot. Preparing the client for configuration by Ansible Key to

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Ansible versus Salt

Over the past few weeks, I worked with two different configuration tools: Salt and Ansible. I started working with Salt. I quickly created a setup for a Salt server and for a Salt minion. The modules I saw looked great. However, I had consistently had trouble converting from the documentation to a practical usage. The examples provided always seemed to be CLI. Taking that and converting it to a SLS file caused me

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Routing with jails

Tonight I asked a question in the OpenVPN IRC channel on FreeNode. me: I’m getting ready to set up a new server, running an OpenVPN client. It will be running several virtual machines (FreeBSD Jails). Each VM will have both a public IP address and a non-routable IP address. I’m hoping to access all those VMs from within the VPN. Am I making sense with my objective here? reply: “clientlan” is (#1) for

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