FreeBSD

The Bacula Tutorial jail server

Leave a Comment / Backups, Bacula, BSDCan, Conventions, DHCP, Disks, File Systems, FreeBSD, Jails, NAT, Operating Systems, pf, PostgreSQL, ssh, ZFS / By /

One of the challenges of providing hands-on demonstrations is giving everyone their own sandbox to play in. I don’t want people to spend time on installing software. I want people to learn about the software in question, specifically Bacula. With this in mind, I’ve been building up a solution based on FreeBSD 9.1, ZFS, and jails. My solution is pretty nifty, but I don’t think it’s anything special. The key is simplicity. The […]

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Creating a ZFS-only box – the first look

3 Comments / File Systems, FreeBSD, ZFS / By /

I’m about to start setting up a ZFS-only box using FreeBSD 8.2. There will be no UFS volumes in this system. Every previous server I have set up has always booted from a gmirror’d UFS system first, then mounted a ZFS array. This time, everything will be on ZFS. I’ve described this server previously when I first chose the parts back in January. Now, the push is on to get this system installed

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Deleting old Bacula Volumes

6 Comments / Backups, Bacula, FreeBSD, Open Source, PostgreSQL, ZFS / By /

From time to time, my Bacula – space and time website shows some old jobs that need to be copied to tape. Stuff from 100 days or more. There’s no reason to copy stuff that old to tape. It’s already been copied to tape. So why does it appear? Last night I swapped some tapes in the tape library. This morning they would have been used and recycled. I’ll bet that those tapes

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MIRROR/gm0 has changed from COMPLETE to DEGRADED

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GEOM Watch sent me an email this morning: The status of GEOM MIRROR/gm0 has changed from COMPLETE to DEGRADED. The following components have been lost: ad6 Remaining components: ad3 Here’s the smartctl output: [dan@ngaio:~] $ sudo smartctl -a -i /dev/ad6 smartctl 5.43 2012-06-30 r3573 [FreeBSD 8.2-STABLE i386] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-12 by Bruce Allen, http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Family: Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Device Model: Maxtor 6Y120M0 Serial

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Aligned versus not aligned

1 Comment / File Systems, FreeBSD, Open Source / By /

In this post, we’re going to demonstrate why aligning your disk partitions can be a good idea. For starters, we’re going to go with the default alignment, do a test, then align, and redo the test. But first, in case you have no idea what I’m talking about, this randomly discovered post may be a useful primer. Create the scheme on the disk This command creates a GPT scheme on the drive. Create

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Aligning disk partitions for better throughput

7 Comments / File Systems, FreeBSD, Open Source / By /

During a recent install of FreeBSD 9.1 onto a gmirror, it was pointed out that my disk partitions were not aligned. Today, I’ll look at how that affects performance, both before and after alignment. Last night, I installed FreeBSD 9.1 onto a separate HDD, which I’ll use as a floater. I can attach this HDD to any system I need to work on without booting from the main HDD. In attached this HDD

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Installing FreeBSD 9.1 into a gmirror

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Late last week I installed FreeBSD 9.1 onto a gmirror, which I created during the install process. I documented it via photographs and comments. Hopefully, the next time I do this, it will be useful to refer to this resource. NOTE that when I did this, the partitions were not aligned properly. See the comments in the above URL for details. I will be covering this in a future post.

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Bacula: TLS Allowed CN

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I wrote this some time ago, but never published it. Here we go… Bacula is a fantastic backup solution. It’s open source. It uses a database to keep track of backups. I’ve been writing recently about using ssl-admin as a certificate authority tool. Today, I started using ssl-admin for generating certificates for my backup clients. In this post, I’m using Bacula 5.2.12 and using this reference page as a guide. I started playing

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Designing a new server, part II

1 Comment / FreeBSD, hardware, ZFS / By /

After posting the original plan, I’ve made a few changes, highlighted below in bold Here is what I’m thinking of getting: SUPERMICRO MBD-H8SGL-O ATX Server Motherboard : $224.99 AMD Opteron 6128 Magny-Cours 2.0GHz 8 x 512KB L2 Cache 12MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 8-Core Server : $259.99 Kingston 8GB 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Registered DDR3 1600 Server Memory : 4 x $59.99 = $239.96 PC Power and Cooling Silencer MK III 600W

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