Open Source

Using a third party tool to drive tarsnap backups

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I have used Tarsnap since at least 2017. The jobs ran nightly. It wasn’t until three years later, that I started cleaning up old backups. Now I’ve found a tool which manages this for me (sysutils/acts) courtesy of a toot by M W Lucas. The selling point of this tool: By default, 31 daily, 12 monthly, and indefinite yearly backups are kept. Sounds good enough for me. I’ll buy that. The install and […]

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Configuration for running poudriere in a jail on FreeBSD 14

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Jails, Open Source, Ports, poudriere / By /

I run poudriere in a jail on FreeBSD – it really is becoming the thing-to-do with all the cool kids. Everyone’s doing it. It is nifty. I will provide only the jail configuration, and not any file system configuration. That is left for you. I think these links might be most helpful: Using poudriere to create a custom FreeBSD repository for package installation Moving poudriere from the host into a jail In this

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Clearing-out multiple drives concurrently – while Watching Fargo Season 5

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It is time to let the knew server go. It has gone through multiple upgrades, new drives, new boards, and new chassis. It has been replaced by r730-03. Before I let it go, I want to clear off the drives. By that I mean: I did this by booting the host using mfBSD (a lovely USB-bootable version of FreeBSD). I then ssh‘d in as root (one of the few situations when ssh as

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Creating a Time Capsule instance using Samba, FreeBSD, and ZFS (latest)

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This is a rewrite of a previous post on the same subject. I have rewritten it because I created a new jail ™ and I’m using a different configuration now. I recently moved a Time Capsule instance from a FreeBSD host into a jail. Later, I moved to using Samba instead of AFP. Why? Samba seems to be the preferred solution because AFP has been deprecated. It still works, but let’s go Samba.

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FreeBSD jailed ZFS datasets – how do I find the .zfs/snapshot directory?

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On FreeBSD, you can jail a ZFS dataset – that is, the jail can manipulate the ZFS dataset as if it was a host (more or less). This has useful applications. In my case, I want to backup a snapshot of that dataset from the host. For example, I want to backup this dataset: [12:19 r730-01 dvl ~] % zfs list data02/freshports/jailed/dev-ingress01/data/latest_commits NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT data02/freshports/jailed/dev-ingress01/data/latest_commits 572K 798G 120K /var/db/ingress/latest_commits Within

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Backing up FreeBSD with Bacula via ZFS snapshot

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Tonight, while watching an episode of The Great British Bake Off, I configured a new Bacula backup jobs to cover some datasets which were not already backed up. I already have a backup jobs to backup all the jails, but only for datasets which sit right under zroot/jails (for example). This new solution takes a list of datasets, snapshots them, backs them up, then destroys those snapshots. Why backup a snapshot? Consistency. During

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Debugging snmp output when using LibreNMS

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Librenms is my tool-of-choice for grabbing metrics from switches, servers, wireless access points, and anything else with an snmp interface. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 LibrenMS 23.11.0,1 – updated to 23.11.0_1,1 within this post net-snmp-5.9.1_4,1 After updating some hosts to FreeBSD 14, the zfs application/extension broke. It was quickly amended after a report was lodged. However, after the fix, I still wasn’t getting graphs. It was nan all across the board for ZFS:

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ntpd[66134]: leapsecond file (‘/var/db/ntpd.leap-seconds.list’): will expire in less than 9 days

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

If you’ve been watching your logs, you’ve probably noticed messages like this: In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 ntpd .2.8p16-a (included with the base OS) There are several FreeBSD PR lodged, the most relevant (to me) is ntpd: leap-seconds.list should not run inside jails, and IETF is no longer hosting it. The fix I am using: Tell ntpd to use this source for leap-seconds. [14:02 r730-01 dvl ~] % sudo sysrc ntp_leapfile_sources=https://hpiers.obspm.fr/iers/bul/bulc/ntp/leap-seconds.list ntp_leapfile_sources: https://cgit.freebsd.org/src/plain/contrib/tzdata/leap-seconds.list

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Avoiding repetition within jail configurations

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Without resorting to configuration tools, such as Ansible, I wonder if there is an easy way to avoid repeating a list of datasets within a jail configuration. First, some facts: FreeBSD 14.0 I use plain vanilla jails I know this can be easily scripted with a configuration tool; that is out of scope for this post I want to explicitly list the datasets; taking all the children of a given dataset is out

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Post upgrade – checking the jails

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Stuff goes wrong. I like to check. Trust. But. Verify. Skip to the end for the list of useful commands. Here’s some of that verification, as briefly mentioned in FreeBSD 14 upgrade – files not removed by delete-old and Excluding some jails from upgrade. After upgrading all the jails on r730-01, I wanted to make sure that all the binaries had been updated from FreeBSD 13. Here’s what I did. This tells me

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