FreshPorts repos to be converted to subversion – a first draft

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FreshPorts is just over 25 years old. The original repository was cvs. Some of it was converted to subversion in October 2002. That same repo was converted to Git in September 15 Some FreshPorts repos are still on subversion – many are up on Github (19 of them at https://github.com/FreshPorts/) I thank Cosmin Stroe (Chicago) and Caleb L. Power for their efforts in this area. This has been an ongoing process. Latest work […]

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Implement Anubis to give the bots a harder time

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On the morning of 1 May 2025, I noticed the FreshPorts production website was under heavy load. For the most part, the database server was running at 100%. The usual load is 7%. Even if you look back 4 weeks, this was highly unusual. I found it was one IP address. I blocked it. The load dropped. It had been going for hours. Time to try Anubis. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 go-anubis

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Making sure I remove the correct drive

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disks, File Systems, hardware, R730 / By /

Yesterday, I discovered I had removed the wrong drive from a zpool. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 Today, the zpool replace command has completed. Next, I carefully chose the right drive to pull from the drive bays. Status This is the zpool status, just before it completed: After it completed: I see gpt/SG_ZHZ16KEX is no longer in the zpool. Not trusting myself, I checked this way: [20:33 r730-03 dvl ~] % zpool status

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What drive did I just remove from the system?

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So there I was… ready to remove the drive from the system. This was the drive which was giving errors and which had already been replaced. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 Let’s look at the drive I just wiped … I was doing this command: [20:11 r730-03 dvl ~] % sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/gpt/HGST_8CJVT8YE bs=4M Let’s run it again and see which drive LED lights up. Yep, there it is. CTL-C, LED goes

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Using ~/.ssh/authorized keys to decide what the incoming connection can do

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~/.ssh/authorized_keys allows you to specify the command run by the incoming ssh connection. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 I was searching for a previous blog post to give you some background. I failed. I backup my Bacula database and my Bacula configuration via rsync. These backups go to more than one host. The following are lines from ~rsyncer/.ssh/authorized-keys on my dbclone host – which gathers database backups from various hosts. The above appears

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LibreNMS Service health file disabled

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There is no solution here. I’m merely documenting. I use LibreNMS for metrics. Recently, a new item has appeared in the logs: Apr 17 00:00:17 besser librenms[81601]: besser.int.unixathome.org(INFO):Service health file disabled. Checking the code, I found the reference on line 422 of LibreNMS/service.py: Searching for health_file, I found: Which tells me I can set this in my configuration. Searching files: [11:21 besser dvl /usr/local/www/librenms] % grep -ril service_health_file * LibreNMS/service.py app/Console/Commands/HealthCheck.php html/js/lang/en.js lang/en/settings.php

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Adding in a hot-spare for zfs on FreeBSD

Leave a Comment / DELL, Disks, FreeBSD, hardware, R730, ZFS / By /

But first, there’s more Right after asking “Anyone running zfsd? Did you do anything in particular to configure it? I just added my first hot-spare to a zpool.”, ivy told me “noooooooo don’t use hot spares!! Keep a cold spare or at least an online device not attached to a pool. otherwise your zpool will randomly decide to attach its hot spare due to a temporary cabling issue or something like that. the

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network connectivity issues – in the #homelab

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Yesterday a big storm came through. Many downed trees (photos here). The power went off at about 0500 and came back again at about 1009, off again at 1309, back at 1319. It was then stable for the rest of the day. Overnight, I saw monitoring alerts which initially made me think there was another power cut. uptime showed that was not the case. I also didn’t see any timeout messages meaning the

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invalid user dan or illegal user dan? Why different messages?

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Last night, I wanted to update several hosts which were running sysutils/samdruckerclientshell. I ran csshX host1 host2 host3 … hostn. I didn’t get connected to all the host, so I closed out those screens and tried againg, adding -l dvl to the command. I got connected. Updated the packages, and went on with other tasks. What happened? On the laptop I was using, I was logged in as the user dan, so the

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