Restoring your non-Apple Time Capsule from your Mac

I have written about backing up your MacBook to a ZFS-based Time Capsule. Today, I restore. I am setting up a laptop to be just like my other laptop. This is not a disaster recovery incident, but it could be. In this post: The laptop is on the same network as the time capsule host (i.e. no VPN). The laptop is on a wired network – not required, but I think that would […]

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Duplicating a zpool

I have these boot drives, I want to copy them to another. They both happen to be zroot and bootable. I booted from mfsBSD and imported both new and old zroot, using the pool ID shown by zpool import -N. root@mfsbsd:~ # zpool import -N pool: data01 id: 2668514456528412656 state: ONLINE action: The pool can be imported using its name or numeric identifier. config: data01 ONLINE mirror-0 ONLINE gpt/S59VNS0N809087J_S00 ONLINE gpt/S59VNJ0N631973D_S01 ONLINE mirror-1

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Creating a 4 drive ZFS zpool: stripe over mirrors

In this post, I am creating a 4 drive ZFS pool consisting of two mirror. In this post: I’m booting from mfsBSD 12.1 ZFS Creating partitions On FreeBSD, it is convention to create partitions. It is not necessary, but I don’t use all the space in case a future replacement drive is slightly smaller than these drives. NOTE: I am not, but have not confirmed that this is no longer a problem in

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Dell R720 flashing Dell PERC H710 mini into IT mode

Dell PowerEdge Servers are common in #homelab use. The hardware gets sold after it goes out of warranty and they get dumped. Most of the disk cards in these servers come flashed for use with RAID and RAID only. Never use a RAID card with ZFS. Always give ZFS direct access to the drives. I won’t go into the details because the reasons why are easily researched. These cards usually arrive in IR

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PDU setttings

This post documents the PDU settings so I know what is plugged in where and the delay they have on power up. pdu1 – before pdu1 – outlet 1 – r720-01 pdu1 – outlet 2 – knew pdu1 – outlet 3 – slocum pdu1 – outlet 7 – LTO4 tape library pdu1 – after pdu2 – before pdu2 – outlet 1 – r720-01 Missing, I can’t find that one. pdu2 – outlet 2

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nut – testing shutdown and startup

Today I tested the shutdown but was mostly concerned by the startup. I wanted the hosts to start in a specific order. I lived tweeted it and that thread is the basis for this post. The UPS has three groups of outlets: primary group, group 1, group 2. Each group has a On Delay setting. You could choose which gear to power on first. I have all mine set to zero, so all

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nut – testing the shutdown mechanism

Following on from my recent nut setup, this is the second in a series of three posts. The next post will deal with adjusting startup and shutdown times to be sure everything proceeds as required. I want to test the host shutdown mechanism without: unplugging the UPS from the mains powering off the UPS without powering off the servers I have just updated all the hosts and the jails on those hosts. This

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Tarsnap – cleaning up old backups

I use Tarsnap for my critical data. Case in point, I use it to backup my Bacula database dump. I use Bacula to backup my hosts. The database in question keeps track of what was backed up, from what host, the file size, checksum, where that backup is now, and many other items. Losing this data is annoying but not a disaster. It can be recreated from the backup volumes, but that is

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Monitoring your UPS using nut on FreeBSD

It is time to replace my existing UPS with another one. I’m getting only 3 minutes of runtime with the existing batteries (and new batteries, after recalibration). It was suggested I buy an Eaton 5PX. I wasn’t convinced. This is the first of three articles about nut. The second is about testing the shutdown. The third will be about testing both shutdown and startup timings. Two days later, I’d purchased a new Eaton

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Some OpenVPN notes, just for me

Today I added a OpenVPN client to a recent laptop I acquired. It was for my mom, but COVID19 has prevented that trip. Sometimes a task is so rarely performed that the steps are unfamiliar or even unknown. This is what I had to do today. The client zip package I create with ssl-admin works fine. Only two changes required from the default settings after importing the files into Viscosity (the OpenVPN client

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