FreeBSD

Servers

Inferno

Maintenance

2005-05-14 Hard Drive Upgrade

Installed Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) and reinstalled OS. Based on the date this was likely FreeBSD 5.3.

2007-07-12 6.2-RELEASE-p5

Added serial console for easier management. Performed source upgrade from 6.1 to 6.2-RELEASE-p5. Not sure when the upgrade was done from 5.3 to 6.1 or how many increments were in between. Such details are lost to history.

2008-01-09 Heat Sink and Fan Replacement

Replaced Heat Sink and Fan (Evercool Socket A). Previous fun died. Inferno didn't like this much.

2008-02-18 Hard Drive Upgrade

Previous hard drive Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (6Y120L0) serial: Y35AK8PE was quickly failing. Added Promise SATA300 TX4 4-port SATA II PCI controller card and Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA 3Gb/s NCQ 750GB 32MB Cache (ST3750330AS)

During the upgrade, updated the system from FreeBSD 6.2 to FreeBSD 7.0 RC2.

2008-02-26 Upgrade to FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE

Upgraded from FreeBSD 7.0-RC2 to 7.0-RELEASE. First successful cross-release upgrade using the new freebsd-update utility. Nice!

Technical Notes

SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology)

http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/ http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/6983

• smartctl -l selftest /dev/ad0
• smartctl -t long /dev/ad0
• smartctl -Hc /dev/ad0

Disk image via dd

dd bs=512 if=/dev/rXX# of=/some_dir/foo.dmg conv=noerror,sync

tar over netcat

• nc -v -v -w 40 -l -p 8888 > foo.tar
• tar cjvf * | nc remotehost 8888

Updating root DNS

dig @a.root-servers.net . ns > /etc/namedb/named.root

Portupgrade

Rebuild Package and all dependent packages

portupgrade -rfx openssl openssl

Disable Vulnerability Checking

DISABLE_VULNERABILITIES=yes

Qmail log Timestamps

Can be converted to human readable using the tai64nlocal command.

Name Services

Retrieving Database Entries

As of FreeBSD 7 the getent utility can be used to retrieve entries from the various administrative databases.

Name Service Caching Daemon

The nscd daemon added in FreeBSD 7 improves performance of nsswitch type lookups (users, groups, etc) but can cause some surprising results with new users not being found in the system. The cache can be cleared for all users by running:

%nscd -I cachename

Using IDE CD Burners

Place the following in /boot/loader.conf for IDE CDRW support:

atapicam_load="YES"
hw.ata.atapi_dma=1

tcpick

tcpick -i rl1 -p -bU -T1 "port 110"

Using Memory Disks

FreeBSD >= 5.x have a memory disk utility that can be utilized to mount file system images.

To setup a memory disk

mdconfig -a -t vnode -o readonly -f /path/to/image.iso -u 1
mount -t cd9660 /dev/md1 /mnt/cdrom

To reverse the process:

mount -u /mnt/cdrom
mdconfig -d -u 1