Over the past few weeks, I worked with two different configuration tools: Salt and Ansible. I started working with Salt. I quickly created a setup for a Salt server and for a Salt minion. The modules I saw looked great. However, I had consistently had trouble converting from the documentation to a practical usage. The examples provided always seemed to be CLI. Taking that and converting it to a SLS file caused me […]
Ansible versus Salt Read More »
Tonight I asked a question in the OpenVPN IRC channel on FreeNode. me: I’m getting ready to set up a new server, running an OpenVPN client. It will be running several virtual machines (FreeBSD Jails). Each VM will have both a public IP address and a non-routable IP address. I’m hoping to access all those VMs from within the VPN. Am I making sense with my objective here? reply: “clientlan” is (#1) for
Routing with jails Read More »
My laptop’s hostname is dent. I want my DNS records to point to that laptop whether I’m connected to my LAN directly (via WIFI or ethernet cable) or via OpenVPN (my VPN of choice). SIDE NOTE: You will see references to nsupdate -k below. Note that in recent versions of this program, the option you want has changed to nsupdate -y. You will find an example of the new format later in this
OpenVPN and dynamic DNS Read More »
In my work on FreshPorts, I’ve learned more than the average non-committer about the FreeBSD ports tree and its oddities. Just about everything learns about a port it gets from ‘make -V’. Even this method can be fraught with difficulty. In an attempt to get the fairest information possible, FreshPorts uses a chroot solution, first proposed by Ryan Steinmetz . Previous posts about this particular solution can be found in the FreshPorts blog.
mounting the FreshPorts chroot within a jail Read More »
I had a Bacula job fail today: Is bacula-sd running on crey? Yes it is. Can I telnet to port 9103 on crey? Yes, I can: $ telnet 10.5.0.20 9103 Trying 10.5.0.20… Connected to crey.example.org. Escape character is ‘^]’. What about from the nyi-fd server? Can I telnet from there? $ telnet 10.5.0.20 9103 Trying 10.5.0.20… telnet: connect to address 10.5.0.20: Operation timed out telnet: Unable to connect to remote host I started
bad ifconfig leads to no pings Read More »
I’ve been meeting a few challenges with running an instance of bacula-fd in each of my jails. Most of them are related to networking. Perhaps my deployment strategies are imposing too many restrictions. The challenges arise on the jail hosts which are not behind my firewall at home. Each of those servers is accessible through a VPN, but the individual jails on those servers are not. The backup of the jail host is
Accessing every jail from a VPN Read More »
I use FreeBSD Jails. I use them a lot. I have jails for websites. I have jails for regression testing, mail servers, OpenVPN servers, etc. I like jails for many reasons. One of which is being able to create a new jail which is pretty much identical to another jail, except for a few things. In this case, I wanted to create a new jail to do regression testing for Bacula, the best
Using ezjail-admin archive to create a new jail, almost like an existing jail Read More »
Last week, while at EuroBSDCon in Malta, I noticed that one of my servers had the wrong time. It was Bacula who told me, through this message in one of the backup jobs: 28-Sep 21:59 nyi-fd JobId 144899: DIR and FD clocks differ by -5 seconds, FD automatically compensating Fixing the time I connected to all my systems, and ran date(1). One system was by 2 seconds, and another was off by 5
different times despite running ntpd Read More »
My ZFS system hits a high load average every week during its scrub. Here is what top looks like after I pressed i and then S: last pid: 42049; load averages: 3.78, 3.26, 3.42 up 18+13:47:14 11:43:01 220 processes: 3 running, 216 sleeping, 1 waiting CPU: 7.5% user, 0.0% nice, 12.8% system, 1.2% interrupt, 78.5% idle Mem: 765M Active, 236M Inact, 8667M Wired, 17M Cache, 3284M Buf, 22G Free Swap: 8192M Total, 2404K
ZFS system hits high load during scrub Read More »
I’m in the process of setting up a new gateway/firewall. The new hardware will be faster and have more space. At present, the old firewall is also providing DHCP and DNS services. I want to move those off the gateway and onto another server. Why? I want the gateway to run only services that are related to gateway/firewall services. That keeps things simple. At present, the new firewall has just 43 packages installed.
Creating a FreeBSD jail to run DHCP and DNS Read More »