Open Source

Creating an Apple Time Capsule using FreeBSD & ZFS

First, all credit goes to Mark Felder’s blog post upon which this is based. You can buy an Apple Time Capsule (I did) to back up your Mac. Now that I have two MacBook’s, I have run out of space, so now I want to backup to ZFS. By backing up to my ZFS filesystem: I am no longer constrained to the capacity of a single disk I can backup my backups to […]

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x8dtu

NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version. The older post is still available This is x8dtu (named after the Supermicro motherboard). This will be the new FreshPorts server. In short: FreeBSD 11 booting off a mirrored pair of zfsroot SSDs 4.5TB of mirrored ZFS 196612 MB of RAM (yeah, that’s 196GB of RAM) Supermicro X8TDU motherboard Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (two of those, giving 16 CPUs) NOTE: this post

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Pentabarf email tokens

As found at: http://web.archive.org/web/20160309091535/http://pentabarf.org/Email Variables The following variables may be used in the text and subject of the mail {{name}} The name of the recipient. {{person_id}} The person-id of the recipient. {{conference_acronym}} The acronym of the conference if the recipients are conference specific. {{conference_title}} The title of the current conference if the recipients are conference specific. {{email}} The email address of the recipient {{event_title}} A comma-separated list of the events in question.

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Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names

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

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ansible: Timeout waiting for privilege escalation prompt

I was doing some work in a remote location with a laggy connection to home. I was running ansible and kept encountering these errors: fatal: [pg01]: FAILED! => {“failed”: true, “msg”: “Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt: “} Rerunning the script would encounter the same error in a different part of the script. After an error-free run I concluded it was my dodgy connection; ansible was waiting for a reply from my

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Server freeze – 2014.12.14

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

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system freezes up with lots of sonewconn Listen queue overflow

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

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Flashing an LSI SAS 9201-16i

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

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

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

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PGCon 2016 charity auction

Every year PGCon holds a charity auction as part of the closing session. All proceeds go to The Ottawa Mission, a local group. The auction includes items you would keep as art, and some you would consume before you left town. Others, such as empty paper bags or cardboard boxes are left in the recycling bin. It is all in good fun. 1 Chocolate from Japan $20.00 2 Elephant with cloud $220.00 3

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