Michael W. Lucas's Blog, page 64

FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials – discount pre-pub available

You can now buy my next tech book, FreeBSD Mastery: Storage Essentials, for $7.99.

This is an incomplete book. It has not been tech reviewed. The advice in it might eat your disks and sell your soul to a Manhattan hot dog vendor for use as a dish cloth. So think of it as a discount pre-order, or your opportunity to correct one of my books before it goes to print.

I will have a tech review done when the first draft is complete.

I had not originally planned to do pre-orders, but I’m now comfortabl...

Installing and Using Tarsnap for Fun and Profit

Well, “profit” is a strong word. Maybe “not losing money” would be a better description. Perhaps even “not screwing over readers.”

I back up my personal stuff with a combination of snapshots, tarballs, rsync, and sneakernet. This is fine for my email and my personal web site. Chances are, if all four of my backup sites are simultaneously destroyed, I won’t care.

A couple years ago I opened my own ecommerce site, so I could sell my self-published books directly to readers. For the record, I didn...

Cloning a FreeBSD/ZFS Machine with ‘zfs send’

My employer’s mail server runs DirectAdmin on FreeBSD, with ZFS. The mail server is important to the company. We want to be able to restore it quickly and easily. While we back it up regularly, having a “known good” base system with all the software installed, where we can restore the mail spools and account information, would be good.

As it runs ZFS, let’s send the filesystems across the network to a blank machine.

First I need an installation ISO for the same release and architecture of FreeB...

mfiutil on FreeBSD

I need to add drives to one of my FreeNAS 8.3.1 boxes. This machine has an “Intel RAID” card in it. I don’t want to use the Intel RAID, I want just a bunch of disks that I can plop a mirror on top of. The BIOS utility doesn’t give me the “just a bunch of disks” option. So I boot into FreeNAS, insert the drives, and the console shows:

Jul 10 10:25:40 datastore5 kernel: mfi0: 6904 (458317539s/0x0002/info) - Inserted: PD 0e(e0xfc/s0)

Jul 10 10:25:40 datastore5 kernel: mfi0: MFI_DCMD_PD_LIST_QUERY...

FreeBSD Disk Partitioning

A couple weeks ago, I monopolized the freebsd-hackers mailing list by asking a couple simple, innocent questions about managing disks using gpart(8) instead of the classic fdisk(8) and disklabel(8). This is my attempt to rationalize and summarize a small cup of the flood of information I received.

The FreeBSD kernel understands several different disk partitioning schemes, including the traditional x86 MBR (slices), the current GPT, BSD disklabels, as well as schemes from Apple, Microsoft, NEC...

next book(s): FreeBSD storage

I’m writing about FreeBSD disk and storage management. (The folks on my mailing list already knew this.) For the last few months, I’ve been trying to assimilate and internalize GEOM.

I’ve always used GEOM in a pretty straightforward: decide what I want to achieve, read a couple man pages, find an archived discussion where someone achieved my goal, blindly copy their commands, and poof! I have deployed an advanced GEOM feature. GEOM was mostly for developers who invented cool new features.

Turns...

OpenBSD and Google Compute Engine

I didn’t see any public notes on this, so I decided to post it:

Google’s Compute Engine SDK installs and runs just fine on OpenBSD. Exactly as per the documentation. Which is what I’d expect, but it’s nice to confirm it.

Have a good weekend!

virtio NIC on OpenBSD 5.5-current

My Ansible host is OpenBSD. Because if I’m going to have a host that can manage my network, it needs to be ridiculously secure. The OpenBSD host runs on KVM (through the SolusVM virtualization management system).

During heavy data transfers, the network card would occasionally stop passing traffic. I could run any Ansible command without issue, but downloading an ISO caused hangs. This was most obvious during upgrades. Downloads would stall. I could restart them with ^Z, then a “ifconfig vio0...

Live webcast on O’Reilly

On Tuesday 27 May 2014, at 1pm EDT, I’ll be doing a live webcast on the O’Reilly community site.

The topic is “Beyond Security: Getting to Know OpenBSD’s Real Purpose.”

Anyone who has seen my mug.org talk already has an idea what angle I’ll take. Some of the slides will differ, and I’ll have some LibreSSL stuff in there as well.

I’ll take questions from the audience afterwards. You can be in that audience.

LibreSSL at BSDCan

Thanks to various airline problems, we had an open spot on the BSDCan schedule. Bob Beck filled in at the last moment with a talk on the first thirty days of LibreSSL. Here are some rough notes on Bob’s talk.

LibreSSL forked from OpenSSL 1.0.1g.

Why did “we” let OpenSSL happen? Nobody looked. Or nobody admitted that they looked. We all did it. The code was too horrible to look at. This isn’t just an OpenSSL thing, or just an open source thing. It’s not unique in software development, it’s just...