Automount External Drive on OS X

At work, we want to backup an external disk that’s connected to the Mac machine using rsnapshot. In order to do that, the external drive needs to be mounted, and this happens when a user logs in to the Mac. The problem is that when nobody logs in, the external drive is not mounted and rsnapshot will fail. The fix should be easy if there is away to mount the external drive without a user logs in....

March 22, 2018 · 1 min · 162 words · kenno

How to change FreeBSD Firefox user agent

This laptop runs FreeBSD 12.0 current. The version of the installed Firefox is 59, which is pretty new isn’t it? Well, that’s not new or good enough to browse outlook.office365.com email. What happened is that, the Outlook web based email would just automatically switch to class Outlook web access. This problem is not unique to Outlook email, even some work related websites refuse to load correctly on Firefox running FreeBSD....

March 13, 2018 · 1 min · 188 words · kenno

How to extend ZFS partition

I have a FreeBSD server which used to run of a smaller SSD drive. When replaced with a larger capacity SSD by using dd command to clone the disk, there is free space allocated. I want to extend the existing zroot pool to use this space. The following describes how I achieve this with the help of a forum post. Let’s list some information about the zroot pool: root@nas:~ # zfs list zroot NAME USED AVAIL REFER MOUNTPOINT zroot 4....

March 11, 2018 · 2 min · 302 words · kenno

SELinux is preventing mpd from getattr access on the directory /root/.config.

What? Why does mpd want to access /root/.config? What’s MPD? It’s a daemon for playing music. It runs as a service, which I connect to with either ncmp or ncmpcpp. Here’s the full SETroubleshoot detail: The version of MPD that causes this issue is: 0.20.10 on Fedora 27. I’m pretty sure it was working last week and I didn’t have to do anything. So what’s changed? Well, it seems like this could be a very old problem as reported int bug 1325502....

March 2, 2018 · 2 min · 282 words · kenno

FreeBSD 12 : Can't update packages size mismatch

It’s another night with another FreeBSD problem. Well, I could just use Linux like Ubuntu or Void, but then things would just work. Where is the fun? 😉 So, I’ve been having problem with upgrading or installing new binary packages on a machine running FreeBSD 12.0 for a few days now. root@vansota:~ # pkg upgrade Updating FreeBSD repository catalogue... FreeBSD repository is up to date. All repositories are up to date....

February 15, 2018 · 4 min · 727 words · kenno

Fix: Fail running Firefox on FreeBSD without D-Bus running

This weekend I replaced Kubuntu 16.04 with FreeBSD 12 on an old HP laptop. I came across with lots of problems, but mainly because I wanted to have some experiences with UEFI and GPT. Anyway, currently the laptop is running FreeBSD 12-current with i3 as the windows manager. After Firefox was installed, I ran it from the menu (rofi) and nothing appeared. So I ran it from a terminal instead. Here was the output:...

February 11, 2018 · 1 min · 134 words · kenno

Create a FreeBSD install disk with dd on OS X

I need to create a bootable FreeBSD install disk and the downloaded file happened to be on a Mac laptop. Since OS X is based on BSD, it also comes with dd utility. After a USB is inserted, I need to identify the disk. This can be done using diskutil command: $ sudo diskutil list /dev/disk0 (internal): #: TYPE NAME SIZE IDENTIFIER 0: GUID_partition_scheme 251.0 GB disk0 1: EFI EFI 314....

February 9, 2018 · 1 min · 199 words · kenno

MySQL server has gone away – how to get it back

Has MySQL/MariaDB server ever run away from you? If it hasn’t, you’re lucky or you’re likely to use PostgreSQL instead. Today I’m trying to restore a database from backup (database dump) onto a new MariaDB server. This is what happened: The database size is 1.7G, and this should not surprised a database administrator. But it did surprise me because: firstly I’m not a db admin, and secondly I had this issue before just a few weeks ago....

February 8, 2018 · 1 min · 147 words · kenno

FreeBSD Recover GTP Table

Recently one of my servers that runs FreeBSD 11.1 keeps hanging on boot. Usually, the 2nd hard reboot will fix it. The root file system on this server is using ZFS and the ZFS pool report it as healthy. So I’ve been reluctant to do anything about it. Until tonight, when I accidentally list the partition of that drive (ada4): Ahh.. [CORRUPT] partition table it seems. I think the reason the server can still boot because GPT keeps the partition tables in two places (yes, one of the more reason to use GPT over MBR)....

February 3, 2018 · 1 min · 127 words · kenno

Blacklisting Local Disk from Multipath

In my previous post, I wrote about my quest to identify a disk presented by the Dell server itself. At the end of the post, I mentioned that I should be able to resume with creating a LVM volume on the new disk. LVM stands for Logical Volume Management. There is a good tutorial available at this page if you’re interested in – How To Use LVM To Manage Storage Devices on Ubuntu 16....

January 28, 2018 · 3 min · 474 words · kenno