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.
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 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