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

Leave a Comment / FreeBSD, Open Source, ssh / By /

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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Why don’t my hosts get IPv6 routes?

Leave a Comment / IPv6, Networks / By /

I started this off as a post on FreeBSD Forums, but as I composed it, I decided it was better as a blog post. This post is most likely not useful to anyone. I solved the problem by rebooting the gateway. I never did find out the cause of the routing issue. Astute readers will recognized the IP4 and IPv6 addresses in this post – they are taken from RFCs which designate ranges

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powerd++: Not always savings

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First, let me be clear: I am a fan of powerd++. I use it on all servers in the basement. A recent test shows my gateway does not benefit from it. To determine the range of this graph, I consulted my logs: [11:31 gw01 dvl ~] % sudo grep powerd /var/log/auth.log Mar 25 12:38:12 gw01 sudo[73534]: dvl : TTY=pts/1 ; PWD=/usr/home/dvl ; USER=root ; COMMAND=/usr/sbin/service powerdxx sto Mar 25 12:38:18 gw01 sudo[73544]: dvl

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Installing the replacement UPS

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Around the end of last year, I started having trouble with my used Eaton 5PX – I’d had it for about 5 years and it was used when I bought it off eBay. On Saturday night (about 21:33:48 UTC), the home network disappeared off the Internet. I figured my new gateway had died. The dead UPS Sunday morning, I returned from the remote undisclosed location to the basement #homelab. Entering the basement, it

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Get faster OpenVPN on FreeBSD by enabling DCO – easily done

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I’ve been configuring a new gateway server for use in my basement data center (home lab). I had recently read about DCO and FreeBSD’s opvn device. DCO (Data Channel Offload) let’s OpenVPN use the encryption features available in many CPUs. In my previous post, I checked; my OpenVPN server and most of the clients are DCO-capable. I decided to try it. I found documentation lacking as to how to use it. I took

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Problems with OpenVPN when server is FreeBSD 14.2 and client is 14.1

Leave a Comment / Bacula, FreeBSD, Open Source, OpenVPN / By /

After replacing an existing gateway with new hardware, the OpenVPN connections had issues. The clients would connect, but non-trivial amounts of traffic would cause errors. This post contains a workaround, by upgrading the OS. I would like to know the cause. In this post, these are the version in use: FreeBSD 14.2 (for the OpenVPN server and some of the clients) FreeBSD 14.1 (for some of the clients) OpenVPN 2.6.13 (on the server

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Invoking ddclient from dhclient to update 3rd party dynamic dns hosts on FreeBSD

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In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 ddclient-3.11.2 Ansible playbook for ddclient: https://github.com/dlangille/ddclient/ forked from https://github.com/hammadrauf/ddclient/ In my previous post, I configured dhclient to setup my Hurricane Electric tunnel and notify HE of same. First attempt: [12:39 gw01 dvl ~] % sudo ddclient [12:47 gw01 dvl ~] % tail /var/log/messages … Mar 6 12:47:50 gw01 ddclient[52929]: WARNING: ” is not a valid IPv4 or IPv6 address Mar 6 12:47:50 gw01 ddclient[52929]: WARNING: found neither IPv4

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When my home DHCP address changes, I want stuff done

Leave a Comment / DHCP, Firewalls/Gateways, IPv6, Networks / By /

I recently moved from an appliance to a FreeBSD 14.2 gateway. In this post: FreeBSD 14.2 gw01 gw01 photos These are the main things I need done when my IP address changes: restart OpenVPN restart my Hurricane Electric IPv6 tunnel with the new IP address – written Tell HE.net about my IP address change – written Notify OpenDNS.com about my IP address change Update a dynamic DNS entry so my VPN clients can

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Debugging aids for pf firewall rules [on FreeBSD]

Leave a Comment / Firewalls/Gateways, FreeBSD, General, Open Source, pf / By /

It is not often that I need to debug pf firewall rules. Yet, when I do, I cannot remember the commands for what I want to do. What is being blocked First, I want to see the firewall rule numbers in the tcpdump output. I am logging all blocked packets, via pflog0. I can use that to see what is being blocked and by what rule. These are found in my /etc/pf.conf: There

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Configuration of net-mgmt/net-snmp on FreeBSD

Leave a Comment / Open Source, snmp, snmpd / By /

I have several posts about net-mgmt/net-snmp – this is the latest. I wrote it back in June and it’s been sitting in drafts ever since. If you read the previous post, you’ll understand why I wrote a new one. In this post: FreeBSD 14.1 net-snmp-5.9.4_6,1 This is the configuration I start with. [dvl@r720-02-nginx01:~] $ cat /usr/local/etc/snmpd.conf agentAddress udp:127.163.0.80:161,tcp:127.163.0.80:161 sysLocation BSD Cabal HQ sysContact dan@langille.org extend nginx /usr/local/etc/snmp/nginx-python3.py extend phpfpmsp /usr/local/etc/snmp/phpfpm-sp When adding auth,

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