Freebsd

Recently, I found out that the ZFS pool on a FreeBSD is running out of space. There is no option to clean up this storage, but there are spare disks. So the next logical thing to do is to add 2 extra disks to the existing (mirror) ZFS pool. This FreeBSD server is a virtual machine (VM), and after attaching 2 physical disks to this VM, I had difficulty identifying these disks. Well, I could guess it, but this is a production server, and I really don’t want to spend my whole weekend to setup this server from the backup. :) ...

It’s been quite a while since I last posted something here. It’s not that I haven’t come across many issues in tech, it’s just that I haven’t had enough time to write anything. So I’m going to share how to easily clear the ZFS metadata on a disk previously used in a ZFS pool. Here is an example - I have an external drive, and it is detected as /dev/da0 when plugged into a FreeBSD server. Though I don’t remember having used it as a member of a ZFS pool called tank, the following output does show that it is the case: ...

What was your first text editor when you started using Linux/Unix? Mine was pico. It was very easy to get started with and quite similar to nano. Then I moved to emacs and sticked with it for a long while. Eventually, I’ve switched to vim (or neovim), and that’s what I have been using until now. Well, the thing about text editor or may be this also applies to many other things, you’re only familiar with features that you constantly use. This means I only know a small subsets of what vim can do. ...

I wanted to install vim package on FreeBSD 13.0, and did so without realizing that there were over 86 additional dependency packages installed. This was done with pkg install -y vim command. Anyway, I wanted to clean up by removing vim and those dependencies after all this is a headless server. Removing vim package doesn’t remove the installed dependencies. Fortunately, I was able to copy and paste the names of dependency packages and save it to a file. My first thought was to just go through each line in that file and run pkg delete -y PACKAGE. In the past I needed to do similar thing in a bash script or command to loop through the content of a file per line. Guess what? I no longer remember how to do that. Hence I’m writing this post to remind my future self in case I need to do this similar thing again. ...

While creating a new user account on one my servers running FreeBSD 12, I encountered the following error: root@nas2:~ # adduser Username: devops Full name: Ansible Operator Uid (Leave empty for default): Login group [devops]: Login group is devops. Invite devops into other groups? []: Login class [default]: Shell (sh csh tcsh nologin) [sh]: Home directory [/home/devops]: Home directory permissions (Leave empty for default): Use password-based authentication? [yes]: no Lock out the account after creation? [no]: no Username : devops Password : <disabled> Full Name : Ansible Operator Uid : 1002 Class : Groups : devops Home : /home/devops Home Mode : Shell : /bin/sh Locked : no OK? (yes/no): yes pw: user 'devops' disappeared during update adduser: ERROR: There was an error adding user (devops). Add another user? (yes/no): no Goodbye! According to a discussion on a FreeBSD forum, the problem could have caused by the databases being out of sync. ...