Open Source

Creating a 4 drive ZFS zpool: stripe over mirrors

4 Comments / Disks, hardware, Open Source, ZFS / By /

In this post, I am creating a 4 drive ZFS pool consisting of two mirror. In this post: I’m booting from mfsBSD 12.1 ZFS Creating partitions On FreeBSD, it is convention to create partitions. It is not necessary, but I don’t use all the space in case a future replacement drive is slightly smaller than these drives. NOTE: I am not, but have not confirmed that this is no longer a problem in […]

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Dell R720 flashing Dell PERC H710 mini into IT mode

2 Comments / DELL, hardware, HBA, Open Source, R720 / By /

Dell PowerEdge Servers are common in #homelab use. The hardware gets sold after it goes out of warranty and they get dumped. Most of the disk cards in these servers come flashed for use with RAID and RAID only. Never use a RAID card with ZFS. Always give ZFS direct access to the drives. I won’t go into the details because the reasons why are easily researched. These cards usually arrive in IR

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nut – testing shutdown and startup

7 Comments / nut, UPS / By /

Today I tested the shutdown but was mostly concerned by the startup. I wanted the hosts to start in a specific order. I lived tweeted it and that thread is the basis for this post. The UPS has three groups of outlets: primary group, group 1, group 2. Each group has a On Delay setting. You could choose which gear to power on first. I have all mine set to zero, so all

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nut – testing the shutdown mechanism

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

Following on from my recent nut setup, this is the second in a series of three posts. The next post will deal with adjusting startup and shutdown times to be sure everything proceeds as required. I want to test the host shutdown mechanism without: unplugging the UPS from the mains powering off the UPS without powering off the servers I have just updated all the hosts and the jails on those hosts. This

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Tarsnap – cleaning up old backups

Leave a Comment / Backups, Bacula, Open Source, tarsnap / By /

I use Tarsnap for my critical data. Case in point, I use it to backup my Bacula database dump. I use Bacula to backup my hosts. The database in question keeps track of what was backed up, from what host, the file size, checksum, where that backup is now, and many other items. Losing this data is annoying but not a disaster. It can be recreated from the backup volumes, but that is

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Monitoring your UPS using nut on FreeBSD

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Nagios, nrpe, nut, Open Source, UPS / By /

It is time to replace my existing UPS with another one. I’m getting only 3 minutes of runtime with the existing batteries (and new batteries, after recalibration). It was suggested I buy an Eaton 5PX. I wasn’t convinced. This is the first of three articles about nut. The second is about testing the shutdown. The third will be about testing both shutdown and startup timings. Two days later, I’d purchased a new Eaton

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Some OpenVPN notes, just for me

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Today I added a OpenVPN client to a recent laptop I acquired. It was for my mom, but COVID19 has prevented that trip. Sometimes a task is so rarely performed that the steps are unfamiliar or even unknown. This is what I had to do today. The client zip package I create with ssl-admin works fine. Only two changes required from the default settings after importing the files into Viscosity (the OpenVPN client

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Changing from one dataset to another within a FreeBSD [iocage] jail

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, FreshPorts, Open Source, snapshots, ZFS / By /

ZFS has a the ability to share itself within a jail. That gives the jail some autonomy, and I like that. I’ve written briefly about that, specifically for iocage. More recently, I started using a zfs snapshot for caching clearing. The purpose of this post is to document the existing configuration of the production FreshPorts webserver and outline the plan on how to modify it for more zfs-snapshot-based cache clearing. The current configuration

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hostmask on an ip address can affect jail DNS

Leave a Comment / DNS, iocage, Jails, named, py-iocage / By /

I encountered, and later solved, a DNS issue on a FreeBSD jail. The jail is my web proxy, of sorts. I have one public IP address, which is dynamic (not relevant, but mentioned only in passing) so all incoming web traffic goes to a single internal RFC-1918 IP address. From there, nginx does reverse proxies out to the various hosts: devgit.freshports.org dev.freshports.org test.freshports.org stage.freshports.org There are more, but you get the idea. Each

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Unintended shutdown of the #homelab

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Today was battery replacement day at my place. The UPS batteries were replaced without downtime. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t downtime. I am not documenting this in real-time. This is post-event analysis. First, I wanted to change the battery replacement date, so I ran acptest on the pfSense server, to which the UPS is connected to. [2.4.5-RELEASE][admin@bast.int.unixathome.org]/root: apctest 2020-08-15 14:51:30 apctest 3.14.14 (31 May 2016) freebsd Checking configuration … sharenet.type = Network &

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