x8dtu

This is x8dtu (named after the SuperMicro motherboard). This is the new FreshPorts server. The older post is still available In short: FreeBSD 11.2 booting off a mirrored pair of zfsroot SSDs 4.5TB of mirrored ZFS 196612 MB of RAM (yeah, that’s 196GB of RAM) SuperMicro X8DTU motherboard Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (two of those, giving 16 CPUs) NOTE: this post replaces

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knew

This post has been replaced by a newer post. This is the previous post for this system configuration. For future reference, this is the knew server … oh wait, I think it’s this server which is was mounted in the 3U chassis mentioned in this post (perviously erroneously referred to as a 4U). It runs a few jails, including Bacula regression testing services. It is now mounted in a SuperChassis 846E16-R1200B This recent

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zpool: FAULTED – too many errors

This server, knew has had an intermittent problem related to CAM status: SCSI Status Error messages. There is a FreeBSD Forums post about it. On Sunday, the problem returned, and this time it degraded the zpool. I collected the information in this gist and I will list the relevant portions below. I had enabled smartd testing and I received this email late on Sunday: Despite the promise of more information in the logs,

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using smartd to automatically run tests on your drives

NOTE: I am not convinced of the value of doing these tests on a regular basis. smartd and smartctl are two utility programs included with the smartmontools package. On FreeBSD, smartmontools is installed via the sysutils/smartmontools port. Those programs can “control and monitor storage systems using the Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology System (SMART) built into most modern ATA/SATA, SCSI/SAS and NVMe disks. In many cases, these utilities will provide advanced warning of

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degraded zpool

On Monday night at about 5:30 PM, I noticed the email: ** PROBLEM alert – knew/zpool is CRITICAL ** What sickened me was that the email was sent at 3:58 PM. That makes me think I should add a Pushover.net alert …. I could do that at my mail server. Logging into the server, I saw: [dan@knew:~] $ zpool list NAME SIZE ALLOC FREE CKPOINT EXPANDSZ FRAG CAP DEDUP HEALTH ALTROOT system 90.5T

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Running FreeBSD on OSX using xhyve, a port of bhyve

bhyve is a hypervisor/virtual machine manager developed on FreeBSD. xhyve is port of bhyve to OS X. It is built on top of Hypervisor.framework in OS X 10.10 Yosemite and higher, runs entirely in userspace, and has no other dependencies. I usually use MacPorts, but ran into trouble with xhyve, so this morning I tried Homebrew instead. Installing Homebew (often referred to as brew) is outside scope, so please refer to their documentation.

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newsyslog: chmod(/var/log/auth.log.6.bz2) in change_attrs: No such file or directory

This problem was difficult to figure out. The cause was simple, but not obvious. Messages such as this were appearing in emails From July: In August: I had no idea why. My initial suspicion was the /etc/newsyslog.conf configuration for that file: [dan@knew:~] $ grep auth /etc/newsyslog.conf /var/log/auth.log root:logcheck 640 7 * @T00 JC [dan@knew:~] $ That count is 7, so why is it complaining about 6? The files look ok: [dan@knew:~] $ ls

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PostgreSQL – convert a user to a role

Users and Roles in PostgreSQL are very similar. When I set up the FreshPorts database back in mid-2000, I was using PostgreSQL 7.0.3 (that’s my best guess based on my blog entry). I suspect roles were not available then and were introduced with PostgreSQL 8. I am positive someone will correct me if that’s wrong. I now have a need to convert a user into a role, then add users to that role.

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Ideas about moving the rack two floors down to the basement

This is a work in progress. As I make more decisions and receive additional suggestions/advice, I will update this page. I live in an apartment. The Verizon FiOS ONT is outside on the ground floor. I live two floors up. I am considering moving the rack from the bedroom to 7x12ft locked room in the basement. It would share space with my washer and dryer (which is vented to the outside). Why? noise

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