Open Source

Optimizing UPS power use when the power goes out

This post is mostly for myself. I’m just putting my Sunday morning thoughts down for later review and consideration. When Selecting replacements batteries for my Eaton 5PX UPS (5PX2200RT & 5PXEBM48RT), I began to think about: when the power goes off, why can’t I keep using my laptop? Usually, I still have an Internet connection: the ISP isn’t going offline. Why not turn off the two servers in the basement, and anything else […]

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Loading up an old copy of a PostgreSQL database, zfs snapshots, and sanoid snapshot management

Sometimes you want to go back to a known good state. And you want to do it quickly, without waiting around. In my case, that’s going to be a zfs snapshot. Today I am preparing to test some code changes so that FreshPorts properly creates a new category. See these recent blog posts for details: Welcome to the new category: filesystems Fixing the category creation code In this post: FreeBSD 14.1-RELEASE-p5 postgresql16-server-16.4 dbclone

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zfs hold / release

Let’s talk about zfs hold. Based on man zfs-hold: “If a hold exists on a snapshot, attempts to destroy that snapshot by using the zfs destroy command return EBUSY.” Let’s apply that to some FreshPorts snapshots which I don’t want going away: This is your typical FreshPorts website: [15:03 dvl-nginx01 dvl ~] % zfs list NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT data02 1.13T 565G 96K none data02/freshports 671G 565G 88K none data02/freshports/jailed 326G 565G

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Self-hosting Bitwarden / VaultWarden on FreeBSD

The time has come for me to consider another application for my TOTP data (think 6-digit codes produced by Google Authenticator or an RSA device. I’ve been using an app called 2STP – I have long liked it. Support for it ended about 7 years ago, yet it continued to slug along on my phone and on my watch. Recently, it stopped working on my watch. That was the tipping point. I decided

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fail2ban – adding to my website to deter abuse

The type of abuse recently seen on FreshPorts isn’t a big deal. I would ignore it if it was on my own server. However, I’m using a “paid” service and the credits go faster when pillocks do pillocky stuff. While I hope I’ve covered what I’ve done, I’ve been sick with a cold for a week, and helping to look after two < 4 year-olds for two weekends in a row. Perhaps I've

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kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from x to y packets/sec

For 3 days now, I’ve been seeing these messages. If you search online, it’s usually the result of port scanning. Aug 7 14:05:15 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from 212 to 195 packets/sec Aug 7 14:05:16 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from 219 to 215 packets/sec Aug 7 14:05:17 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port RST response from 220 to 193 packets/sec Aug 7 14:05:18 zuul kernel: Limiting closed port

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What’s this gap in the graphs?

I was checking email this (Friday Jul 19, 2024) morning, over coffee, while many IT folks dealt with Cloudstrike fallout, when I noticed this message from the logs: Jul 19 09:12:18 zuul kernel: [zone: pf states] PF states limit reached I’ve seen that message before. It’s not of high concern. That server contains many services including PGCon, the former BSDCan website, and my blogs. I didn’t give it much concern, although I should

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Where’s my backup?

Nagios was telling me: FILE_AGE WARNING: /usr/home/rsyncer/backups/aws-1/postgresql/freshports.org.dump is 117636 seconds old and 3608113799 bytes That means the FreshPorts backup is more than a day old, and it should have been refreshed by now. OK, let’s go look. I log into the host known as aws-1 and check the files. They look fresh to me: [rsyncer@aws-1 ~/backups/database-backup/postgresql]$ ls -lt total 3525154 -rw-r–r– 1 rsyncer rsyncer 3963 Jul 16 02:14 globals.sql drwxr-xr-x 2 rsyncer rsyncer

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Transferring a VM from one provider to another

Yesterday, I mentioned (in more than one place) that I planned to move a 2017 Digital Ocean droplet over to Azure. As I sit here, with coffee, on the balcony, overlooking lot of green trees, at 7:45 AM, I’m trying to put into words the plan I came up with about 30 minutes ago. In this post: Digital Ocean Microsoft Azure FreeBSD 14.1 Why move? There is no technical issue or dissatisfaction involved

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Updating some jails from FreeBSD 14.0 to FreeBSD 14.1 via mkjail

I’ve updated all my hosts to FreeBSD 14.1 – but not all the jails. I’m going to do some of that today. In this post: FreeBSD 14.0 FreeBSD 14.1 mkjail-0.0.4 What’s on r730-03 to update? Full disclosure: mkjail was originally written by Mark Felder, and I joined him in maintaining it. I use it for: Creating jails Updating jails (patching, like freebsd-update fetch install) Upgrading jails (as in going from FreeBSD 14.0 to

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