Open Source

Migrating one Bacula Volume to another

I run Bacula. I have coded for Bacula. Now I’m writing about Bacula again. Bacula is by far and away the best open source program for managing network-based backups. In this article, I will show you how I migrated a bunch of jobs from a disk Volume to a tape Volume. However, the approach I will use can be applied to any type of job migration. Why bother? I’m running of disk space […]

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Avoiding dynamic IP address woes with a VPN

I’m sick of dealing with dynamic IP issues. My broadband connection at home has a dynamic IP address. I can always find out what my home IP address is. I’m using dns/noip to manage a hostname which points to home. I can always ssh home via the hostname. The problems arise when I try to restrict access to services provided at home or access to services on external servers. For example, the web

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SVN commits now available

The SVN commits are now available for viewing. At present, only the FreeBSD src tree is working through SVN. Therefore, the easiest way for you to see those commits is through the FreshSource interface. That link takes you to the SVN version. You will notice that the src commits are duplicated. This was not done intentionally. However, it is fortunate in it allows for easy fact checking. This error is possible only because

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Database load times

With all the databases I run, I need a daily sanity check. I download a copy of each database and do a test load on my system at home. Today I timed that process: $ time ~/bin/backup-supernews.sh … real 77m57.323s user 12m52.610s sys 0m56.136s There are 11 such databases. The dump files range in size from 5K (globals.sql) to 2.8G (freshports.sql). The script that does this is pretty simple, but has evolved over

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openx upgrade issues

I’ve been running ads on my websites since early 1999, so nearly 10 years. It was roughly May 2002 that I started using phpPgAds. This was the PostgreSQL version of phpAdsNew. This project became OpenAds and is now known as OpenX. Recently I decided to upgrade to the latest version of OpenX. There was a upgrade path from Openads-PgSQL-2.0.11-pr1, the latest releast of OpenAds to use PostgreSQL, to OpenX 2.6. The first problem

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stunnel “local socket: Protocol not supported”

Tonight I encountered this problem when starting stunnel: 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG7[43534:134656000]: Private key loaded 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG7[43534:134656000]: SSL context initialized for service 6000 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG5[43534:134656000]: stunnel 4.25 on i386-portbld-freebsd6.3 with OpenSSL 0.9.7e-p1 25 Oct 2004 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG5[43534:134656000]: Threading:PTHREAD SSL:ENGINE Sockets:POLL,IPv6 Auth:LIBWRAP 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG6[43534:134656000]: file ulimit = 11095 (can be changed with ‘ulimit -n’) 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG6[43534:134656000]: poll() used – no FD_SETSIZE limit for file descriptors 2008.10.17 02:46:02 LOG5[43534:134656000]: 5417 clients

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cfengine – practical examples

In a sea of inadequete cfengine examples, one stands out: http://www.sysadmin.hep.ac.uk/wiki/Cfengine. I’m in the early stages of developing an administration strategy for a jail server I’m setting up. It will run regression tests for Bacula. I’ve already found ezjail, which will help me create the jails. What I needed was tool for administering the jails. I don’t want to ssh to 10 different systems just to update a script on each one. I

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OSCON 2007 – the details, the people

I was at OSCON 2007 this week. I was there to present my Nobody Ever Regretted Making a Backup talk: In the past few years, Bacula has been gaining ground on more established solutions, both open source and proprietary. This talk will introduce you to Bacula, show you the main components, give you an outline of how it works, and illustrate why Bacula is becoming so widespread. My talk was scheduled for the

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Good bye IPsec. Hello OpenVPN.

I’ve been playing with OpenVPN since mid December. I like it. I like it better than IPsec. Why? Because OpenVPN can give me direct access to all my systems wherever I am. I can cvsup from my cvsup server at home from a hotel in Toledo (if I’m ever there). IPsec can do that. But it is much more complex to set up. OpenVPN is pretty simple. At present, my wireless gateway is

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