NOTE: I wrote this post nearly two years ago, in May 2015. It has been sitting ignored and unloved in my Drafts. I’ve just published it today. I’m big on backups and I use Bacula. I have about 18 TB on about 350 tapes and about 10 TB of backups on disk. I want more. I last used Tarsnap back in July 2010 (I know that because I found the old Tarsnap registration […]
My first big Tarsnap backup Read More »
Last night, when I got my FreeBSD & ZFS based Time Capsule running, I had to connect my laptop to the same network as the server in question. This is not ideal. My usual work flow: connect to the WIFI, then connect to the VPN, then I get access to those services. These are different subnets, so the Netatalk broadcast does not traverse the switch. It stays inside so my laptop does not
Accessing your Time Capsule when on a different subnet Read More »
First, all credit goes to Mark Felder’s blog post upon which this is based. You can buy an Apple Time Capsule (I did) to back up your Mac. Now that I have two MacBook’s, I have run out of space, so now I want to backup to ZFS. By backing up to my ZFS filesystem: I am no longer constrained to the capacity of a single disk I can backup my backups to
Creating an Apple Time Capsule using FreeBSD & ZFS Read More »
NOTE: this post has been replaced by a newer version. The older post is still available This is x8dtu (named after the Supermicro motherboard). This will be the new FreshPorts server. In short: FreeBSD 11 booting off a mirrored pair of zfsroot SSDs 4.5TB of mirrored ZFS 196612 MB of RAM (yeah, that’s 196GB of RAM) Supermicro X8TDU motherboard Intel Xeon E5620 @ 2.40GHz (two of those, giving 16 CPUs) NOTE: this post
I’ve been given a Dell PowerEdge R610. I’ve installed two 30GB SSDs and installed FreeBSD 11 on it. It will become a tape library server. EDIT: 2017.11.29 – the drives, network card, and SAS card have been moved to the R710. The swap: The zpools: Oh, well, that’s a problem. Let’s fix it: There. Fixed. Just. Like. That.™ The filesystems: And dmesg:
As found at: http://web.archive.org/web/20160309091535/http://pentabarf.org/Email Variables The following variables may be used in the text and subject of the mail {{name}} The name of the recipient. {{person_id}} The person-id of the recipient. {{conference_acronym}} The acronym of the conference if the recipients are conference specific. {{conference_title}} The title of the current conference if the recipients are conference specific. {{email}} The email address of the recipient {{event_title}} A comma-separated list of the events in question.
Pentabarf email tokens Read More »
I have a system with three tape drives and two tape changers. If one tape library is powered off when the system boots, the device names for the other tape library may be skewed. That is, /dev/sa0 may not be the LTO-4 drive, it will be the SDLT drive. This is not ideal. FreeBSD uses device.hints for this. I have used it before, and for quite some time, however, I learned something new
Using device.hints to wire physical devices to specific names Read More »
This page will hold slides from talks I have presented. This list is not complete. Tips on running a conference for 250 people all by yourself – EuroBSDCon 2012 – slides
You like tech. You know you like it. Do you know what part of tech you are most passionate about? I credit a Google employee for the following idea. It was told to me while I was at the FreeBSD Foundation booth at GHC 2016. The following is a relatively cheap project you can do in your spare time, weekends, and evenings. For the following tasks, blog about each step, in sufficient detail
Where is your tech passion? Read More »
I was doing some work in a remote location with a laggy connection to home. I was running ansible and kept encountering these errors: fatal: [pg01]: FAILED! => {“failed”: true, “msg”: “Timeout (12s) waiting for privilege escalation prompt: “} Rerunning the script would encounter the same error in a different part of the script. After an error-free run I concluded it was my dodgy connection; ansible was waiting for a reply from my
ansible: Timeout waiting for privilege escalation prompt Read More »