NTP, UTC, and (negative) leap seconds

[David Magda]

Hello,

So there was a recent weblog post on a timekeeping observation:

https://fanf.dreamwidth.org/133823.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25145870  (via)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second

In all circumstances in the past, leap seconds were added:

23:59:57Z
23:59:58
23:59:59
23:59:60
00:00:00
00:00:01

The post brings up the possibility of a “negative” leap second, i.e., a skip:

23:59:57Z
23:59:58
00:00:00
00:00:01

Has anyone tested this scenario on FreeBSD?

Thanks for any info.

--
David Magda
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Re: DNS Flag Day and freebsd.org problems

[David Magda]

On Jan 17, 2019, at 20:11, Michael Sinatra  wrote:
> 
> I suspect the freebsd.org hostmaster will probably want to drop a line to ISC.

I’ve gotten a response from the dnsadm@ folks, who will follow up with the ISC 
folks.

Not many people know about this it seems:

https://old.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/agqdkf/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18930798

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Re: DNS Flag Day and freebsd.org problems

[David Magda]

Which then tells me to go to dnsadm@. Thanks.

> On Jan 17, 2019, at 19:42, George Mitchell  wrote:
> 
> On 1/17/19 6:55 PM, David Magda wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> On February 1, 2019, there will be some major changes to DNS with regards to 
>> EDNS:
>> [...]
>> It turns out that freebsd.org is effected by this:
>> [...]
>> Who is the person that should be looking at this for FreeBSD?
>> [...]
> 
> According to freebsd.org's SOA record, that would be
> hostmas...@freebsd.org.   -- George
> 

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DNS Flag Day and freebsd.org problems

[David Magda]

Hello,

On February 1, 2019, there will be some major changes to DNS with regards to 
EDNS:

> A number of DNS software and service providers have announced that we will 
> all cease implementing DNS resolver workarounds to accommodate DNS 
> authoritative systems that don’t follow the EDNS protocol. Each vendor has 
> pledged to roll out this change in some version of their software by the 
> ‘Flag Day.’ 
[…] 
> Domains served by DNS servers that are not compliant with the standard will 
> not function reliably after February 1, 2019, and may become unavailable.
> 
> If your company’s DNS zones are served by non-compliant servers, your online 
> presence will slowly degrade or disappear as ISPs and other organizations 
> update their resolvers. When you update your own internal DNS resolvers to 
> versions that don’t implement workarounds, some sites and email servers may 
> become unreachable.

https://www.isc.org/blogs/dns-flag-day/

It turns out that freebsd.org is effected by this:

> This domain will face issues after the 2019 DNS flag day. It will work in 
> practice, BUT clients will experience delays when accessing this domain. We 
> recommend you request a fix from your domain administrator! You can refer 
> them to https://dnsflagday.net/ and technical report

https://ednscomp.isc.org/ednscomp/db40f2cca8

Who is the person that should be looking at this for FreeBSD?


More information, including links to test suite, at:

https://dnsflagday.net

Regards,
David

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Re: pax(1) needs to learn POSIX-pax format (by libarchive(3)?)

[David Magda]

On Nov 4, 2016, at 04:54, Harry Schmalzbauer  wrote:

> Would be wonderful if someone could catch up pax(1)'s libarchive(3)
> transition, but I guess the libarchive developers aren't interested or
> have very much spare resources…

Have you asked them? Do they know it is a problem? Do they have a bug tracking 
system?

If people do not tell them about problems they cannot know about them. If not a 
lot of people complain about a bug, then they may think it is a low priority: 
the more people complain about it the higher up the TODO list it will go.

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Re: pax(1) needs to learn POSIX-pax format (by libarchive(3)?)

[David Magda]

On Nov 1, 2016, at 13:44, Harry Schmalzbauer  wrote:

> Has anyone ever thought about? Unfortunately I'm lacking skills and time :-(

You’ll want to talk to the folks here:

http://libarchive.org

That is the upstream project. It actually started on FreeBSD over a decade ago 
but spun off on its own, and is used by a wider audience nowadays.

I provided some sample Solaris-ACL files early in the development. If you 
provide some problematic files I’m sure they’ll be willing to help.

Regards,
David
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Re: Can't get ntp to work

[David Magda]

> On Oct 18, 2015, at 08:03, Marcin Wisnicki  
> wrote:
> 
> My ntpd stopped synchronizing clock sometime ago (default ntp.conf).
> 
> To debug the problem I've tried running ntpdate and got strange results:
> 
>> # ntpdate 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
>> 18 Oct 13:53:14 ntpdate[55102]: no server suitable for synchronization found
>>  
>> # ntpdate -u 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
>> 18 Oct 13:53:19 ntpdate[55119]: adjust time server 193.25.222.240 offset 
>> 0.002672 sec
> 
> 
> This would point to broken firewall BUT:
> 
>> # nmap -p123 -sU 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org
>> 
>> Starting Nmap 6.49BETA5 ( https://nmap.org ) at 2015-10-18 13:52 CEST
>> Nmap scan report for 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org (193.25.222.240)
>> Host is up (0.027s latency).
>> Other addresses for 0.freebsd.pool.ntp.org (not scanned): 94.154.96.7 
>> 95.158.95.123 46.175.224.7
>> rDNS record for 193.25.222.240: afrodyta.complex.net.pl
>> PORTSTATE SERVICE
>> 123/udp open  ntp
>> 
>> Nmap done: 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 0.64 seconds
> 
> So there is nothing blocking the traffic.
> 
> Any ideas ?

Both “nmap" and “ntpdate -u” would use an unprivileged, ephemeral port, while 
ntpd(8) and a regular run of ntpdate(8) would use UDP 123 as the source port. 
Perhaps there is a firewall issue with source ports lower than 1024?

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Re: protecting some processes from out-of-swap killer

[David Magda]

On Tue, April 28, 2015 05:51, Ronald Klop wrote:

 The OS trying to kill a process is probably not what you want. So when you
 protect(1) postgres the OS will kill another process, which I hope is not
 running without reason.
 My advice would be to
 - or increase your swap space
 - or tune postgresql to use less memory
 - or limit tmpfs (tmpfs uses swap if RAM is short)
 - or tune zfs to use less memory

Personally I didn't even know FreeBSD had an OOM killer. I regularly run
into Linux's though, but that's because by default Linux allows
over-committing of memory.

I was under the impression that FreeBSD did not over-subscribe memory, and
so would not allow a process to do a malloc() unless there was enough
RAM+swap to satisfy it.

Is this a mistaken assumption? (I probably have to buy the McKusick,
Neville-Neil, Watson book.)


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system backups (was: Package database)

[David Magda]

On Sep 6, 2013, at 12:23, Jim Ballantine j.ballant...@gmail.com wrote:

 The backup in /var/backups was a copy of the current DB, so it was not
 usable, however there was/is and older backup that was not corrupt.  So I 
 restored
 it into /var/db and then update that one.

Which is nice reminder to everyone about the importance that fact that a 
proper backup is a coherent copy of data on independent media. Ideally one 
would coherent copies going back in time over various periods in case earlier 
ones are corrupted.

It's good that this worked out for the OP, but this raises a question in my 
mind (as someone who works in IT): what things on FreeBSD are considered 
system files that need to be regularly backed up?

The simplest thing is to just backup all the files on every system, but are 
there more critical files. Most people would include /etc and user/personal 
data (e.g., /home) as important, but as we've learned in this thread, there are 
other files that are important for a properly working system. Is backing up all 
/var on the critical list? Only /var/db or /var/backups?

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Re: Bind in FreeBSD, security advisories

[David Magda]

On Wed, July 31, 2013 02:55, sth...@nethelp.no wrote:

 I'm also more than a little surprised about people dragging out
 sendmail as a shining example of *good* (bug-free?) software. Does
 nobody remember any history here? It wasn't *that* many years ago
 that we seemed to have sendmail-bug-of-the-day...

Seven years ago and ten years ago:

http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-06:17.sendmail.asc
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-06:13.sendmail.asc
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-03:13.sendmail.asc
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-03:11.sendmail.asc
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-03:07.sendmail.asc
http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-03:04.sendmail.asc

In the same time period, BIND has had eighteen advisories. OpenSSL has had
fourteen.


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Re: svn - but smaller?

[David Magda]

On Tue, March 12, 2013 19:32, John Mehr wrote:
 This sounds good to me, and as long as there's some sort
 of a consensus that we're not breaking the principle of
 least surprise, I'm all for it.  The one default that may
 be unexpected is the defaulting to the stable branch --
 people who track the security branches will be left out. 
 So maybe something like:

 svnup --ports
 svnup --stable
 svnup --security (or --release)

 Thoughts?

If svnup will eventually going to be used to update a variety of
repositories, on a plethora of operating systems, then hard coding the
above may not be appropriate. Something akin to svnup --repo={ports,
stable, security, release} may be better, and then have a configuration
file with the settings.


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Re: Musings on ZFS Backup strategies

[David Magda]

On Mon, March 4, 2013 11:07, Volodymyr Kostyrko wrote:
 02.03.2013 03:12, David Magda:
 There are quite a few scripts out there:

  http://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=zfs

 A lot of them require python or ruby, and none of them manages
 synchronizing snapshots over network.

Yes, but I think it is worth considering the creation of snapshots, and
the transfer of snapshots, as two separate steps. By treating them
independently (perhaps in two different scripts), it helps prevent the
breakage in one from affecting the other.

Snapshots are not backups (IMHO), but they are handy for users and
sysadmins for the simple situations of accidentally files. If your network
access / copying breaks or is slow for some reason, at least you have
simply copies locally. Similarly if you're having issues with the machine
that keeps your remove pool.

By keeping the snapshots going separately, once any problems with the
network or remote server are solved, you can use them to incrementally
sync up the remote pool. You can simply run the remote-sync scripts more
often to do the catch up.

It's just an idea, and everyone has different needs. I often find it handy
to keep different steps in different scripts that are loosely coupled.

 This allows one to get a quick list of files and directories, then use
 tar/rsync/cp/etc. to do the actual copy (where the destination does not
 have to be ZFS: e.g., NFS, ext4, Lustre, HDFS, etc.).

 I know that but I see no reason in reverting to file-based synch if I
 can do block-based.

Sure. I just thought I'd mention it in the thread in case other do need
that functionality and were not aware of zfs diff. Not everyone does or
can do pool-to-pool backups.


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Re: Musings on ZFS Backup strategies

[David Magda]

On Mar 1, 2013, at 21:14, Ben Morrow wrote:

 But since ZFS doesn't support POSIX.1e ACLs that's not terribly
 useful... I don't believe bsdtar/libarchive supports NFSv4 ACLs yet.

Ah yes, just noticed that. Thought it did.

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/TarNFS4ACLs

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Re: Musings on ZFS Backup strategies

[David Magda]

On Mar 1, 2013, at 12:23, Daniel Eischen wrote:

 dump (and ufsdump for our Solaris boxes) _just work_, and we
 can go back many many years and they will still work.  If we
 convert to ZFS, I'm guessing we'll have to do nightly
 incrementals with 'tar' instead of 'dump' as well as doing
 ZFS snapshots for fulls.

Keep some snapshots, and send stuff to tape after a certain amount of time. 
Most (though not all) restores are usually within x weeks, where x is a 
different value for each organization. (Things will be generally asymptotic 
though.)

So if you keep 1 week worth of snapshots, you'll probably end being able to 
service (say) 25% of restore requests: the file can be grabbed usually from 
yesterday's snapshot. If you keep 2 weeks' worth of snapshots, probably catch 
50% of requests. 4 weeks will give you 80%; 6 weeks, 90%; 8 weeks, 95%. 

Of course the more snapshots, the more spinning disk you need (using power and 
generating heat).

Most articles describing backup/restore best practices I've read in the last 
few years have stated you want to use disk first (snapshots, VTLs, etc.), and 
then clone to tape after a certain amount of time (x weeks). Or rather: disk 
AND tape, then clone to another tape (so you have two) and purge the disk copy 
after x.

So in this instance, keep snapshots around for a little while, and keep doing 
your tape backups for long-term storage. Also inform people about the 
.snapshot/ directory so they can possibly do some self service in case they 
fat finger something (quicker for them, and less hassle for help desk/IT).

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Re: Musings on ZFS Backup strategies

[David Magda]

On Mar 1, 2013, at 15:39, Daniel Eischen wrote:

 On Fri, 1 Mar 2013, kpn...@pobox.com wrote:
 
 What about extended attributes? ACLs? Are those saved by tar?
 
 I think tar (as root or -p) will attempt to preserve those.

Specifically bsdtar (with libarchive) and star:

https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive/wiki/TarPosix1eACLs
http://www.freshports.org/archivers/star/

GNUtar is a bit tricky: older versions don't handle ACLs at all so you have to 
check version numbers on your creation and extraction hosts.

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Re: Musings on ZFS Backup strategies

[David Magda]

On Mar 1, 2013, at 12:55, Volodymyr Kostyrko wrote:

 Yes, I'm working with backups the same way, I wrote a simple script that 
 synchronizes two filesystems between distant servers. I also use the same 
 script to synchronize bushy filesystems (with hundred thousands of files) 
 where rsync produces a too big load for synchronizing.
 
 https://github.com/kworr/zfSnap/commit/08d8b499dbc2527a652cddbc601c7ee8c0c23301

There are quite a few scripts out there:

http://www.freshports.org/search.php?query=zfs

For file level copying, where you don't want to walk the entire tree, here is 
the zfs diff command:

 zfs diff [-FHt] snapshot [snapshot|filesystem]
 
Describes differences between a snapshot and a successor dataset. The
successor dataset can be a later snapshot or the current filesystem.
 
The changed files are displayed including the change type. The change
type is displayed useing a single character. If a file or directory
was renamed, the old and the new names are displayed.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zfs

This allows one to get a quick list of files and directories, then use 
tar/rsync/cp/etc. to do the actual copy (where the destination does not have to 
be ZFS: e.g., NFS, ext4, Lustre, HDFS, etc.).

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Re: FreeBSD in Google Code-In 2012? You can help too!

[David Magda]

On Tue, October 23, 2012 10:39, Fbsd8 wrote:

 The subject is Google Code-In and all the posted tasks are directed at
 creating documentation. Not one deals with coding any programs. If I was
 15-17 years old I sure would not be interested in writing documentation.
 I would want to use and develop my coding skills. To that end there a
 lot of simple PR's waiting for attention. This is an target area that
 young coders would find more interesting.

It would depend on what one's interests were. I've known a few technical
writers over the years, and even if that is not one's long-term career
objective, being paid to simply write is something a lot of people
wouldn't mind doing.

It's just that most writers don't hang out on Unix mailing lists. :)


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Re: The MFC process...

[David Magda]

On Tue, July 17, 2012 02:10, Eitan Adler wrote:
 Of interest to me: if it could be limited to just the commits I made
 and optionally show me the log message and diff it would be very
 helpful.

 On a general note: be careful with any level of automation with this
 script though. Sometimes there are good reasons that a commit wasn't
 MFCed.

A lot of messages have a MFC after note on them, so the the developer/s
in question already know which commits are good candidates for bringing
over to STABLE. It may simply be that they could use a reminder on them.

If there are commits that would be nice to backport, but don't have an
MFC note on them, then an email and/or PR would probably be the best way
to enquire about their candidacy.

I think having a script automatically pulling changes from HEAD, to
STABLE, is a bad idea. A human should be the one doing it and examining
the results, even if they get an automated reminder.


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Re: Netflix's New Peering Appliance Uses FreeBSD

[David Magda]

On Jun 5, 2012, at 20:16, Scott Long wrote:

 If you have any questions, let me know or follow the information links on the
 OpenConnect web site.

Out of curiosity, given that Linux seems popular in so many other places 
(Google, Facebook), is there any particular reason why FreeBSD was chosen for 
this?

I'm sure Linux is used in many other places (much of Netflix's IT 
infrastructure is on Amazon IIRC), so I'm kind of surprised that they went with 
FreeBSD when they probably already have so much knowledge with Linux.

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Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[David Magda]

On Jun 2, 2012, at 00:51, Daniel Kalchev wrote:

 On 02.06.2012, at 07:19, Freddie Cash fjwc...@gmail.com wrote:
 
 
 Glustre sits above the storage system, replicating data between systems.
 So, disks -- ZFS (via Zvols) -- Glustre.
 
 
 How is this different than ZFS using remote zvols via iSCSI? Can it tolerate 
 down nodes better than ZFS?

Gluster ~ NFS++.


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Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[David Magda]

On Jun 1, 2012, at 09:12, Phil Regnauld wrote:

 * Gluster
 
   For very large FSes, nothing beats it, especially now that 3.3 has been
   released.

Isilon built their OneFS on top of FreeBSD, does that count? :)

Panasas too IIRC.

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Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[David Magda]

On Jun 1, 2012, at 08:33, Daniel Kalchev wrote:

 For example if one wants an e-mail server, that is better served in the long 
 run by IMAP+MTA than any form of Exchange, because you are not tied to one 
 single platform and that vendor's lunacy. Otherwise FreeBSD runs just fine as 
 server for about any other OS client, provided those clients use standard 
 Internet protocols.

If all you want is e-mail, then there are certainly better options than 
Exchange IMHO. However, once you get into calendars (private and shared, with 
delegation to secretaries, etc.), meeting rooms, ActiveSync (to remotely wipe 
lost devices), then it's a whole different game.

E-mail was solved a long time ago, but Exchange does many things on top of it 
that many organizations find very handy, and where there doesn't seem to be a 
decent open alternative.

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Re: Why Are You NOT Using FreeBSD ?

[David Magda]

On Jun 1, 2012, at 21:03, Chris Nehren wrote:

 You say your'e using ZVOLs but then recommend gluster for large
 filesystems. I would like to take a moment to point out that one of the
 design goals of ZFS was to scale beyond the capabilities of current
 hardware. 
 
 What does gluster do that ZFS does not? I'm not trying to troll here,
 but am genuinely curious about ZFS's shortfalls in one of the problem
 domains it seeks to address.

ZFS is for storing file systems on locally connected block devices. Gluster is 
a network file system where data can be distributed over many nodes.

So ZFS can ensure that bits-on-disk stay safe through checksums and mirroring / 
RAIDZ, while Gluster allows entire file servers to go offline and the files are 
still accessible because you have a kind of network-level RAID going on. This 
also helps in performance since instead of clients pounding on one file server 
(as usually happens with NFS), every write is sent to many data nodes so you're 
striping across many network elements. Think of it as NFS on steroids.

A competitive open source equivalent would be Lustre, while Isilon and Panasas 
would probably be commercial alternatives (though they do NFS / CIFS on the 
'front-end' and the distributed magic occurs on a 'back-end' network between 
the appliances).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GlusterFS
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lustre_(file_system)

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Re: Sector size of a zvol

[David Magda]

On Fri, February 3, 2012 07:25, Pete French wrote:
 So, I was trying to create a disc witha  sector size of 4096 bytes, and I
 assumed that simply creating a zvol with that blocksize would do the
 trick.
 But it appears that whatever the blocksize is on the xvol, diskinfo is
 reporting the sector size as 512 bytes.

 I this the intended behaviour ? I dont have a Solaris system to hand to
 test it on, so I have no ida if this is BSD specific or not.

Yes, it is intended. The pool sector size and ZFS dataset block size are
parameters are independent of each other.

AFAIK, there is no way to specify the sector size to use in a ZFS pool: it
is completely automatic when you call zpool create. Ideally it should
query the disk about its sector size and use that, but I don't know if
that has been implemented (and can't be bothered to dig through the source
at this time :).


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Re: Sector size of a zvol

[David Magda]

On Fri, February 3, 2012 10:03, Pete French wrote:
 [...] But what I am talking about is the sector size
 presneted by the 'fake' disc that a ZVOL creates - that always seems
 to be 512 bytes, despite the fact that the zvol blocksize is 8k. Seems
 odd to me (and that 8k size os alterable, but just doesnt seem to
 be reflected in the zvol). As it stands I can make a zpool on top
 of 4k discs, a ZVOL using 8k blocks on top of that, but the things
 talking to it will use 512 byte chunks, which surely impacts performance ?

Try the following from the zfs(1M) man page:

zfs create [-ps] [-b blocksize] [-o property=value] ... -V size volume
[...]
 -b blocksize

   Equivalent to -o  volblocksize=blocksize.  If  this  option  is
   specified  in  conjunction  with -o volblocksize, the resulting
   behavior is undefined.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=zfs

Did use blocksize or volblocksize in your zfs create command?


A thread for zfs-discus on volblocksize:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2005-November/000450.html


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Re: Sector size of a zvol

[David Magda]

On Fri, February 3, 2012 11:05, Pete French wrote:
 You can use the method described here to create a zvol with 4k sector
 size:
 http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2010-December/010350.html

 I saw that, but it describes setting up a zpool, not a zvol - or are
 you saying that a zvol created on such a zpool will have 4k sectors ?
 Unfortunately I am not at liberty to recreate the pool on the server,
 so I cant try it, but thanks for the tip...

No, I think it's just that few folks work with/ask about zvols that most
people's brains short-circuit and go straight to thinking about only
zpools and datasets--regardless of the text of the subject line. :)


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RE: FTPS Server?

[David Magda]

On Thu, January 5, 2012 14:28, Malcolm Waltz wrote:

 I've included a working vsftpd.conf below for FTPES.  For what you are
 doing, you may not need all of these parameters.  The pasv_ parameters are
 mostly only necessary if you need to serve data through a NAT/firewall.
 The pasv_min_port and pasv_max_port will effect how many simultaneous
 connections can be supported by the server.  You may have to try various
 permutations depending on how EyeFi has implemented their client.  If you
 Google vsftpd.conf, you will probably find various sets of instructions
 for how to set it up for your needs.  It helps if you know exactly what
 the client is expecting.  There are a number of variations on the
 standard.  vsftpd can handle all of them I believe.  Also tools like
 tcpdump, wireshark, netstat and lsof are your friends here.
[...]

Are/Were there any special settings that needed on your
firewall/router/NAT box?

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Re: cpio and directory owner preservation behaviour

[David Magda]

On Thu, September 22, 2011 10:54, Olivier Cochard-Labbé wrote:
[...]
 [root@R3]/#(cd /usr/local/etc; find . -name ripd.conf -type f | cpio
 -dumpv /tmp/)

 The file owner and permission for ripd.conf is keept:
 [root@R3]/#ls -alh /tmp/quagga/ripd.conf
 -rw---  1 quagga  quagga   134B Sep 22 15:28 /tmp/quagga/ripd.conf

 But not the directory owner that is changed to root:wheel
 [root@R3]/#ls -alh /tmp | grep quagga
 drwxr-xr-x   2 root  wheel   512B Sep 22 16:41 quagga

 Is a cpio bug ?

No it is not a bug, because the find(1) command will only print 
quagga/ripd.conf to its output, and not quagga/ as well. Since cpio(1)
only receives quagga/ripd.conf, it will only put the information for
that item in the archive stream.

Try the following command:

   # (cd /usr/local/etc; find quagga | cpio -dumpv /tmp/)

instead. This should grab quagga/ itself, in addition to its contents in
the archive stream.

If you want to know which items (files, directories, other) that cpio(1)
grab information on just run the find(1) without piping its output
anywhere. If you don't see the item of interest on a line of its own,
cpio(1) will not grab its metadata.


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Re: Usling vlan(4) without an actual lan behind it

[David Magda]

On Mon, September 19, 2011 08:02, Pete French wrote:
 Can anyone see any problem is doing this ? i.e. creating a vlan interface
 which doesnt correspond to any physical interface, just as a place to hang
 IP addresses. I am trying to work around a problem with carp and ndp when
 there are multiple IPv6 addresses bound to it.

Does it specifically have to be a vlan(4), or can you perhaps add another
address to lo(4), or perhaps create a lo1 in addition to the lo0?


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Re: Usling vlan(4) without an actual lan behind it

[David Magda]

On Mon, September 19, 2011 08:45, Pete French wrote:
 Does it specifically have to be a vlan(4), or can you perhaps add
 another
 address to lo(4), or perhaps create a lo1 in addition to the lo0?

 It can be anything really - I was looking for a generic interface
 I can configure with IP addresses. But adding real addresses to
 loopback interfaces can cause problems can it not ?

No, you can create an lo0:1 that's a /32 and it shouldn't be a problem.

There are a bunch HOWTOs around on configuring anycast that instruct one
to put the service IP on an alias on lo0 and then run an OSPF process
that advertises that this IP is available on this host (which acts as a
router).

http://www.openfusion.net/linux/anycast_dns


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Re: Unable to shutdown

[David Magda]

On Tue, August 30, 2011 11:50, Kevin Oberman wrote:
[...]
 The more I look at this, the more it seems to me that it is an issue
 with the Seagate drive and not a FreeBSD issue. Probably a bug that is
 never triggered on Windows, so is largely unnoticed. I suspect Widows
 probably orders the command is a subtly different order.
[...]

Or not the drive per se, but the USB-to-IDE/SATA chipset.

A while back on the OpenSolaris zfs-discuss list there was an issue where
USB drives would have corrupt ZFS pools if a drive was yanked without a
'zpool export' being run. Even though ZFS is supposed to always be
consistent on-disk (because it's transactional), this wasn't happening.

It turned that the chipset had a list of particular SATA commands that it
allowed through to the drive, and all others were simply answered with
OK, regardless of what actual actions needed to be taken. One of the
SATA commands that was NOT whitelisted was the 'cache flush'
command--which ZFS needs to make sure that it's data structures were
written in the proper order.

Turns out the drive and its firmware were fine and doing things properly,
it's just that the necessary commands weren't getting to it because of the
USB adaptor's chipsset.


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Re: HEADS UP: ZFS v28 merged to 8-STABLE

[David Magda]

On Jun 10, 2011, at 17:25, Volodymyr Kostyrko wrote:

 Am I missing something? How about using fletcher[24] for dedup?

Fletcher is fairly weak as things go, and so even though two checksums are the 
same, there's a decent chance that the data is actually different. At least 
with recent releases of (Open)Solaris, when you enable do a 'dedup=on' the has 
used is SHA-256, which has very, very, very, low odds of having the same value 
occur from two different blocks of data.

When ZFS dedupe originally came out you could have one of the following values:
. off
. on (== sha256)
. flecther4 with verify/compare
. sha256 (without verify/compare)
. sha256 with verify

There was a long-ish thread on zfs-discuss  fairly recently on whether SHA-256 
was good enough where you could trust it, or whether one should do a verify 
step in addition to SHA-256:


http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2011-January/046875.html

While some people argued that it was prudent to use verify (especially with 
your data/job on the line), a good portion of folks though said that it's not 
worth it (i.e., if you're not worried about being hit by lightning (2^-17 to 
2^-18), you shouldn't be worried about a hash collision (2^-128)).

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Re: HEADS UP: ZFS v28 merged to 8-STABLE

[David Magda]

On Jun 10, 2011, at 17:24, Bob Friesenhahn wrote:

 Dedup can require a huge amount of RAM, or a dedicated L2ARC SSD, depending 
 on the size of your storage.  You should not enable it unless you are 
 prepared for the consequences.

Under OpenSolaris, each tracking entry for a deduped block (which can be 
between 512B to 128KB) can be up to 376 bytes (struct ddt_entry): so for one 1 
GB (10^9) of deduped data (244140 blocks@4K), you would need ~91MB of overhead 
to keep track of it; for 1 TB (10^12) of deduped data  you would need ~91 GB of 
space to keep track of all the blocks. And if you can't fit the DDT in RAM, it 
will have to be saved to disk, which means more I/O to fetch the data.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs/sys/ddt.h?rev=1.2

If your data is in blocks smaller than 4K you'll need more memory for the DDT; 
if the data is broken up into blocks larger than 4K you'll probably need less.

Also remember that even though an L2ARC cache may save you from having to go to 
spinning rust, you still need to use some RAM (struct arc_buf_hdr; ~178B) to 
reference the DDT stuff in L2ARC:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs/arc.c

A few threads on zfs-dicuss on this:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2011-April/thread.html#48026
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2011-May/thread.html#48185

Also, the above numbers are for OpenSolaris: someone may want to check the 
structure sizes for FreeBSD to be sure. They should get you in the right 
ballpark though.

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Re: Constant rebooting after power loss

[David Magda]

On Apr 1, 2011, at 23:35, Matthew Dillon wrote:

The solution to this first item is for the OS/filesystem to issue a
disk flush command to the drive at appropriate times.  If I recall the
ZFS implementation in FreeBSD *DOES* do this for transaction groups,
which guarantees that a prior transaction group is fully synced before
a new ones starts running (HAMMER in DragonFly also does this).
(Just getting an 'ack' from the write transaction over the SATA bus only
means the data made it to the drive's cache, not that it made it to
the platter).

It should also be noted that some drives ignore or lie about these flush 
commands: i.e., they say they flushed the buffers but did not in fact do so. 
This is sometimes done on cheap SATA drives, but also on expensive SANS. If the 
former's case it's often to help with benchmark numbers. In the latter's case, 
it's usually okay because the buffers are actually NVRAM, and so are safe 
across power cycles. There are also some USB-to-SATA chipsets that don't handle 
flush commands and simply ACK them without passing them to the drive, so 
yanking a drive can cause problems.

There has been quite a bit of discussion on the zfs-discuss list on this topic 
of the years, especially when it comes to (consumer) SSDs.

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Re: unable to pwd in ZFS snapshot

[David Magda]

On Dec 26, 2010, at 06:32, Daniel Braniss wrote:


btw, why use rsync if 'zfs send| zfs recv' work realy nice?


You're assuming that both sides of the transmission are on ZFS, which  
is not always true.


It may be that the FreeBSD/ZFS system is the back up server for a  
network of Linux machines, and so is the destination of the rsync job.  
It may be that the destination is Linux or AIX or HP-UX.

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Re: ZFS backups: retrieving a few files?

[David Magda]

On Tue, November 23, 2010 14:14, Mike Tancsa wrote:
 I am still trying to figure out the best way to do zfs backups locally
 here for rollbacks as well as DR. I was looking at some of the
 techniques at

 http://www.cuddletech.com/blog/pivot/entry.php?id=984

 But thats outdated ?  WRT errors in the file, perhaps PAR* tools can
 overcome some of these issues if you are dumping to a file on tape

 */usr/ports/archivers/par2cmdline

The above is still quite valid, and snapshots are one of base principles
of ZFS. From the official ZFS Admin Guide:

 The following solutions for saving ZFS data are provided:
* Saving ZFS snapshots and rolling back snapshots, if necessary.
* Saving full and incremental copies of ZFS snapshots and restoring
  the snapshots and file systems, if necessary.
* Remotely replicating ZFS file systems by saving and restoring ZFS
  snapshots and file systems.
* Saving ZFS data with archive utilities such as tar and cpio or
  third-party backup products.

http://dlc.sun.com/osol/docs/content/ZFSADMIN/gbchx.html

You'll notice that 3/4 mention snapshots. I think them and zfs send/recv
are the starting points for getting consistent images of disks. There's no
equivalent to dump(8)/restore(8), and so tar and cpio are the main
utilities if you want offline stuff:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/backup-basics.html

Until very recently the output format of zfs send was not stabilized, so
there was no guarantee that it was readable from one version to the next.
I believe that has been fixed in [Open]Solaris, but I haven't been
tracking pjd's commits that closely to know about FreeBSD.

Hopefully zfs diff will make it into FreeBSD soon-ish, so that it's
easier to do incremental backups to previous snapshots/check points.
Traversing large file systems is getting really old in this day-and-age,
and that one little thing can certainly remove a lot of I/O seeks if you
only want to grab the files that have changed recently.


See also the best practice guide, which should be generic enough to cover
most operating systems:

http://tinyurl.com/2gehn4#Recommendations_for_Saving_ZFS_Data
http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Recommendations_for_Saving_ZFS_Data

-- 
David Magda
Toronto, Canada

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Re: ZFS backups: retrieving a few files?

[David Magda]

On Nov 22, 2010, at 17:13, Andrew Reilly wrote:


The currently accepted practice is to create a ZFS file system on the
backup drive and just keep sending incremental snapshots to it.  As  
long
as the backup drive and host system have a snapshot in common you  
can do
incremental transfers.  This way you only have to keep the most  
recent
snapshot on the main system and can keep as many as you have space  
for

on the backup drive.  You also have direct access to any backed up
version of every file.


That sounds like a very cool notion.  Not unlike the
time-machine scheme.  Interesting how different capabilities
require going back and re-thinking the problem, rather than just
trying to implement the old solution with the new tools.


As noted, saving the output of zfs send isn't very useful and  
generally not recommended as  a backup mechanism. It's come up quite  
often on Sun/Oracle's zfs-discuss list:


http://www.google.com/search?q=zfs+send/receive+as+backup+tool

In addition to regular snapshots, also make sure to have an offline  
backup of some kind (tar, Networker, NetBackup, Amanada, etc.). Errors  
can propagate to online copies / backups, and if an intruder can  
penetrate your primary system, there's a good chance they can get to  
the secondary copy of your data; penetrating a tape on a shelf over  
the network would be much more challenging. :)


Newer versions of ZFS also support a zfs diff command, but I'm not  
sure if that functionality has made it into FreeBSD yet:


http://www.google.com/search?q=zfs+diff

Combine diff with some snapshots and scripting, and you can speed up  
things like tar and rsync a lot since you don't have to traverse the  
entire file system to find changes.



And at the end of the day remember it's not about about backups, but  
about restores. If you can't restore coherent data in a timely manner  
it's pointless.


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Re: TTY task group scheduling

[David Magda]

On Nov 18, 2010, at 18:43, Julian Elischer wrote:


we are part of the way there..

at least we did abstract the scheduler to the point where we have  
two completely different ones. you are welcome to develop a  
'framework as you describe and plug it into the abstraction we  
already have.


It may be something to suggest for the next round of Google's Summer  
of Code. Or perhaps part of a school project in operating systems work  
(master's level? eager-beaver bachelor's thesis?).


Having a bit more flexibility in being able to make different  
components pluggable would help encourage the use of BSD in more  
research projects. And more people learning and hacking on BSD can't  
be a bad thing. :)


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Re: Make ZFS auto-destroy snapshots when the out of space?

[David Magda]

On May 30, 2010, at 18:03, Kirk Strauser wrote:

The only one need that it addresses is that now FreeBSD would come  
with a built-in recovery system. Did a make installworld but  
screwed something up and ended up with a non-bootable system? Pop in  
a recovery CD and revert to the 4 hours ago snapshot, then reboot.  
Voila! It never happened. Accidentally deleted /etc/passwd? Retrieve  
the version from /.zfs/snapshot/weekly-2010-21/etc/passwd . Just  
realized that you deleted an important file 3 months ago and only  
keep 2 weeks worth of backups? No problem, as long as you haven't  
filled up your hard drive since then.


All scriptable.

For the case of make installworld, a make.conf variable can be  
created to run a zfs snapshot before any kind of 'make install';  
this could be for both Ports and the base system. Portmanager and/or  
portupgrade could also be expanded to optionally do this.


(Open)Solaris already has this with the Live Upgrade and boot  
environment idea if you want a comparison:


http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/820-5238/ggavn

http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-2240/bootadm-1m
http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/doc/819-2379/gglaj

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Re: Make ZFS auto-destroy snapshots when the out of space?

[David Magda]

On May 29, 2010, at 16:07, Kirk Strauser wrote:

I'd propose standardizing on an attribute like  
org.freebsd:allowautodestroy. Modify ZFS's disk full behavior [...]   
Also run a daily periodic script to ensure that the free space stays  
below a configurable threshold each day so that ZFS isn't constantly  
butting up against completely full drives.



Why not simply have a script that runs and checks for pool usage and  
then deletes snapshots with that attribute if necessary? Why do you  
need to have have it built into ZFS?


What do you think? It seems like this should be pretty easy to  
implement without requiring any upstream changes or new FreeBSD-only  
data structures. The whole thing could possibly be implemented in  
userspace, but I don't know that ZFS has any exception handling  
callbacks that would make it easy.


IMHO this shouldn't be built into the file system. You have one script  
to automatically generate snapshots, and another to monitor usage and  
delete old ones.


This idea was talked about on zfs-discuss in 2006:


http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2006-May/thread.html#2266

Good summary in this post:

http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2006-May/002313.html

Generally I don't think this is the Unix Way. I don't want my kernel  
doing stuff behind my back. If I want snapshots I'll create them  
(scripted or manual); if I want to get rid of them for whatever  
reason, I'll destroy them (scripted or manual). Either of these  
behaviours can then be controlled by an rc.conf(5) variable perhaps.


There's already an useful creation tool for OpenSolaris:

http://src.opensolaris.org/source/xref/jds/zfs-snapshot/

There's also an auto-scrub script:

http://blogs.sun.com/constantin/entry/new_opensolaris_zfs_auto_scrub

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Re: Make ZFS auto-destroy snapshots when the out of space?

[David Magda]

On May 30, 2010, at 22:17, Kirk Strauser wrote:

For instance, what happens if a disk-full condition occurs 2 minutes  
before the cron job would have run that would've averted it? At what  
level do you trigger deletions that would both 1) provide enough of  
a safety margin that disk-fulls are unlikely, but 2) allow the  
snapshots to take advantage of as much storage as possible?


What happens now when your UFS file system gets full? :) The situation  
is no worse than that in the case of a pool filling up, regardless of  
whether it's because of an abundance of snapshots or simply lots of  
regular user data.



But we have all sorts of daemons that do stuff behind our back.


Yes, but they're daemons, not kernel code. As a general rule I like to  
be able to do a ps(1) on any one of my systems and be able to describe  
what every single PID does. If it's Amanda, I know what its purpose  
is; if it would be something called auto-snap(8) or auto-scrub(8) or  
auto-snap-clean(8) then I'd have to learn what those are.


An event framework would certainly be helpful in a general sense  
(Linux has event(3) AFAIK), and that could certainly be useful for  
purging snapshots during resource constrained situations. But even if  
we don't have it, I doubt a fork(2) from cron(8) and a statfs(2) would  
be onerous on a system. :)


That just scrubs the pools, ie verifies checksums and data  
consistency.


Yes, I know, it was the general principle I was going after: if you  
want something periodic to be checked, you should run it from cron/SMF/ 
launchd/etc.


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Re: Multi node storage, ZFS

[David Magda]

On Mar 24, 2010, at 19:45, Michal wrote:

 It's all well and good having 1 ZFS server, but it's fragile in the  
the sense of no redundancy, then we have 1 ZFS server and a 2nd with  
DRBD, but that's a waste of money...think 12 TB, and you need to pay  
for another 12TB box for redundancy, and you are still looking at 1  
server. I am thinking a cheap solution but one that has IO  
throughput, redundancy and is easy to manange and expand across  
multiple nodes


If you want an appliance, a Sun/Oracle 7000 series may be close:

http://www.oracle.com/us/products/servers-storage/storage/open-storage/

The 7310 allows for two active-active heads, with fail over if one  
dies. Does NFS, SMB/CIFS, and iSCSI; the newest software release  
(2010.Q1) gives SAN functionality so you can export LUNs via FC if you  
purchase the optional HBAs.


Unfortunately Oracle's web site seriously sucks compared to Sun's for  
product information. A lot of good weblog posts though:


http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/slog_screenshots  (write perf.)
http://blogs.sun.com/brendan/entry/l2arc_screenshots  (read perf.)

http://blogs.sun.com/ahl/entry/sun_storage_7310
http://blogs.sun.com/wesolows/category/Clustering

Probably cheaper in price than most vendors, but more expensive than  
DIY (though you have to add the cost of time).


Disclaimer: just a generally happy Sun customer.  (We'll see about  
Oracle though. :)


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Re: ntpd does not re-query servers, when a new interface appears

[David Magda]

On Mar 10, 2010, at 03:25, Dominic Fandrey wrote:


In the meantime, your comments made me realize, that I can circumvent
this problem by adding the ntp pools to my /etc/hosts file.


Up to a point: using DNS, the results round-robin--which helps the  
server operators--and dead servers are also removed from the pool  
automatically (AFAIK).


You'll lose the latter with a static host table, which may affect  
things if things break upstream.


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Re: ntpd struggling to keep up - how to fix?

[David Magda]

On Feb 21, 2010, at 11:36, Torfinn Ingolfsen wrote:

On Sun, 21 Feb 2010 16:08:23 +1100 Peter Jeremy  
peterjer...@acm.org wrote:



Having re-checked my maths, using both your time reset results, can
you please try:
 sysctl machdep.acpi_timer_freq=3570847
That should result in a drift of close to zero (well within NTP's
lock range of +/- 300ppm).


And a few hours later: from /var/log/messages:
Feb 21 09:54:50 kg-f2 ntpd[55452]: ntpd 4.2.4p5-a (1)
Feb 21 09:59:10 kg-f2 ntpd[55453]: kernel time sync status change 2001

More info:
r...@kg-f2# ntpq -p
remote   refid  st t when poll reach   delay
offset  jitter

==
*kg-omni1.kg4.no 78.157.115.4 3 u   31   64  3770.174   
-10.253   0.160

r...@kg-f2# ntpdc -c loopi -c sysi
offset:   -0.010253 s
frequency:6.744 ppm
poll adjust:  -30
watchdog timer:   47 s

[...]

For future reference, how does the math work? How do you go from  
taking a timer number:


$ sysctl machdep.acpi_timer_freq
machdep.acpi_timer_freq: 3577045

And the ntpd(8) time reset log entries to adjust the frequency? Or do  
you use the PPM output of the ntpdc(8) command?


I'm not quite sure I understand what happened here. :)

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Re: ZFS user library?

[David Magda]

On Jun 22, 2009, at 04:00, Borja Marcos wrote:

I see... Not rocket science actually. Just the standard  
functionality of zfs(8) without resorting to ugly execve and text  
parsing, something more reliable to list snapshots, etc.


Maybe it's a matter of waiting...


At some point it probably will be stabilized, but it hasn't happened  
yet.


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Re: ZFS user library?

[David Magda]

On Jun 18, 2009, at 13:21, Kip Macy wrote:

I was wondering if there are plans to document and keep the ZFS  
user library

as a reasonably stable API.


You really need to ask that on the ZFS lists. Usually Solaris man
pages indicate that an API is not stable (assuming) man pages exist.
With a few minor exceptions, ZFS in FreeBSD just tracks ZFS in
OpenSolaris.


As mentioned above, there is a libzfs but the Sun people are still  
changing things a lot so they can't guarantee compatibility. One  
example of these changes is the crypto work being done in OpenSolaris:


http://www.opensolaris.org/os/project/zfs-crypto/phase1/libzfs_api/

Is there something specific you're looking to do? The file system  
layer of ZFS (the ZPL) is in flux, but there may be other components  
(e.g., DMU) that may be more stable (the Lustre folks are coding  
against it in user land). See pages 7 and 8 for the three main layers:


http://opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/docs/zfs_last.pdf

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Re: ZFS version 8 on stable?

[David Magda]

On Jun 13, 2008, at 09:54, Dillon Kass wrote:

Your only option is to wait until this is committed or patches are  
offered at least.

pjd is the man so it shouldn't be too long :-)


Another option could be to see if you can help with the coding. :)
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Re: [OT] Which one is best MTA for me?

[David Magda]

On Aug 28, 2007, at 13:46, Clayton Milos wrote:

I use qmail with vpopmail not because it's necessarily the best MTA  
but because I know it backwards. I've patched it and tweaked it so  
it runs like lightning but all the patching and tweaking tought me  
the guts of how it runs. If something goes wrong (which has  
happened two or three times) I can get the system back up in a  
flash, often before people realized that anything did go wrong.


What happens if you win the lottery and decide to leave your place of  
employment? What does the organization do when the next person comes  
in and there's this high-specialized set up?


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Re: named.conf restored to hint zone for the root by default

[David Magda]

On Aug 2, 2007, at 18:16, Kevin Oberman wrote:


Also, the root zone is updated twice a day, every day (at least to the
extent of a serial number bump) whether it is needed or not.  
Forcing the
minimum refresh to once a day could delay the recognition of a new  
zone

for up to a day and that is not a good thing.


Well, if it's updated twice a day (every twelve hours), then use  
Nyquist and check every six hours. :)



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Re: ntpd flipping between PLL and FLL mode

[David Magda]

On Dec 19, 2006, at 09:07, Oliver Fromme wrote:


Roland Smith wrote:

[...]

The following patch to ntp_loopfilter.c should quell the message:
 STFU patch 
--- ntp_loopfilter.c.orig   Tue Dec 19 14:13:25 2006
+++ ntp_loopfilter.cTue Dec 19 14:14:02 2006
@@ -593,12 +593,6 @@
kernel time sync disabled %04x,
ntv.status);
ntv.status = ~(STA_PPSFREQ | STA_PPSTIME);
-   } else {
-   if (ntv.status != pll_status)
-   NLOG(NLOG_SYNCEVENT | NLOG_SYSEVENT)
-   msyslog(LOG_NOTICE,
-   kernel time sync enabled %04x,
-   ntv.status);
}
pll_status = ntv.status;
if (pll_nano)
 STFU patch 


I think it makes sense to replace LOG_NOTICE with LOG_DEBUG,
so you can still get at the messages if you really want to.
It's not necessary to remove the logging code alltogether.


This bug has been reported to the NTP maintainers:

https://ntp.isc.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=452

It's been assigned to Harlan Stenn (stennatntp.org). There have  
been no notes added to the bug report after the initial report on  
2005-06-15.


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Re: FreeBSD 6.2

[David Magda]

On Dec 12, 2006, at 13:10, Wilko Bulte wrote:

Only if Santa thinks you have been nice to your family the last  
year :)


Personally I've always wanted to get a copy of his naughty list. ;)

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Re: Running large DB's on FreeBSD

[David Magda]

On Oct 23, 2006, at 19:10, Chuck Swiger wrote:

Moderately...it kinda depends on the budget available.  I regard  
Solaris + Oracle as one of the most reliable combinations for  
moderate to extreme load, for a system that might well be in  
operation for five to ten years.  If I was going to do FreeBSD, I  
might look into Postgres instead of MySQL; well, I might look into  
something else than MySQL under many circumstances.  I've gotten  
some pretty good use out of OpenBase, for another choice.


FWIW, Solaris 10 Update 3 (6/06) comes with Postres on the DVDs and  
you can get official support from Sun if that's important. Solaris/ 
x86 does run on HP hardware (with support available), but I don't the  
exact HCL offhand.


As for Postgres on FreeBSD, FlighAware seems to be using it some some  
decent amount of data:


. Receiving the data and processing it puts them about 6 minutes  
behind real time

. Generating one map can be done in about 160 milliseconds of CPU time
. Capable of generating several million maps a day
. About 1 TB of stored data
. Approximately 40 million position updates on air craft per day


http://joseph.randomnetworks.com/archives/2006/05/12/flightaware- 
freebsd-and-postgresql/


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Re: ARRRRGH! Guys, who's breaking -STABLE's GMIRROR code?! - back to Pawel

[David Magda]

On Sep 13, 2006, at 21:00, Karl Denninger wrote:

BTW, part of the issue here with the -BETA thing is that there's no  
clear
timeline on this available to people.  I certainly was not aware  
that you were
in a pre-check period to locking down the code to start the process  
of burning

the next minor official rev.


Some upcoming release information is available online:

http://www.freebsd.org/releng/

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Re: FreeBSD Security Survey

[David Magda]

On May 22, 2006, at 11:49, Allen wrote:

On my Slackware machines, it was no problem at all, I'd use wget to  
grab

the patch .tgz file, then do this:

upgradepkg *.tgz


I believe there was some talk in the past of treating the base system  
like a package.  NetBSD has some code that does this called syspkg,  
but it isn't really working AFAICT.


The planned work on updating the installer was part of this (and Tim  
Kientzle's work on libarchive as well). FreeBSD Update would be  
something in a similar vein.


Is it safe to assume that this is still somewhat desired, but that  
one of the stumbling blocks is time / resources?


Regards,
David
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Re: ssh- lagging logins

[David Magda]

On Apr 19, 2006, at 00:16, Low Kian Seong wrote:


Cyberhigh,

Well, you can always try to find out what is going on my passing  
the '-vvv'

parameter to ssh while it's trying to access the remote machine.

On 4/19/06, CyBerHigh [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:


I am using Freebsd 6.0 and running Openssh.  All of a sudden it takes
nearly 4 minutes to conferm that my password is correct.  It has  
never

done this to me and all of a sudden it started it.  I haven't even
update the ports collection or anything so there is no reason I can
think of way it would just start?

Does anyone else have this problem?


You may want to check your DNS infrastructure / settings. SSHd does  
lookups to make sure that forward and reverse mappings are the same.  
If there's an issue with DNS, then these lookups may take a while.


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Re: Disappointed

[David Magda]

On Apr 10, 2006, at 17:56, Mark Linimon wrote:

In the meantime, we volunteers (who do at least 90% of the FreeBSD  
work)

will continue trying to do our best, with no written guarantee that it
will suit your purposes.


If you read the EULA on most commercial operating systems you'll find  
that they state that there's no guarantee that it's fit for any  
purpose either.

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Re: Maximum Swapsize

[David Magda]

On Apr 10, 2006, at 21:45, Pete Slagle wrote:

When you have more than enough RAM you don't need any swap space at  
all.


You need enough swap space to do a dump in case a panic occurs.

While panics are (hopefully) rare, if it does happen, you usually  
want things set up so that you can figure out /why/ the panic occurred.

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Re: nss_ldap problem

[David Magda]

On Mar 4, 2006, at 04:04, Frode Nordahl wrote:


/etc/nsswitch.conf
group: ldap files
hosts: files dns
networks: files
passwd: ldap files
shells: files
imap: ldap


Why do you have ldap first? I would use files ldap in any case  
so local changes can override the directory.


And if there's an issue with the network, things will slow down to a  
crawl when the system is waiting for the LDAP server to respond  
(which it won't, so you're waiting for the time out to occur).


Another scenario is when you boot up in single user mode: if you do  
an 'ls -l' the UIDs need to be looked up to display the usernames by  
default, so the passwd look up is performed, and since the network  
hasn't been brought up you're waiting for the timeout.

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Re: XFS -when?

[David Magda]

On Feb 14, 2006, at 16:27, Iantcho Vassilev wrote:


Do you guys if a stable xfs support is going to be release?


A search for 'freebsd xfs' came up with the following at the top of  
the list:


http://people.freebsd.org/~rodrigc/xfs/

I would recommend that if you have more questions please ask in - 
current as that's where development for future versions occurs.

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Re: vinum or gvinum

[David Magda]

On Sep 9, 2005, at 07:31, Michael Butler wrote:


Swap is the first slice which is not
mirrored and the second slice contains the bootable file-system which 
is

mirrored.


What happens to a running system if the disk dies and swap suddenly 
disappears? :)


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Re: dangerous situation with shutdown process

[David Magda]

On Jul 15, 2005, at 11:08, Bill Vermillion wrote:


If you only do huge copies and immediate shutdowns rarely, then
maybe it's just a good idea to remember how softupdates work, and
then fsck, then shutdown.


This may sound simplistic, but what about a triple sync(8)? (sync; 
sync; sync)


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Re: dangerous situation with shutdown process

[David Magda]

On Jul 16, 2005, at 11:03, Bill Vermillion wrote:


Actually I saw that documented a very very long time ago in
an Intel Unix manual.


It's present in more recent documentation. :)

The sync utility can be called to ensure that all disk writes have 
been
 completed before the processor is halted in a way not suitably 
done by

 reboot(8) or halt(8).

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=syncsektion=8

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Re: SATA vs SCSI ...

[David Magda]

On Jun 26, 2005, at 22:34, Marc G. Fournier wrote:

In fact, looking at the SATA 2.x specs, each chanell there is rated at 
300MB/s, which, again, if I could 'max out evenly', could seriously 
blow away the SCSI bus itself ...


*If* I'm reading this right ... ?


Bus speed does not equal drive speed. And while yes, SATA is now 
approaching SCSI in bus speed, it doesn't mean that SCSI isn't standing 
still. A 640 MB/s bus was standardized in 2003 (though SATA is planned 
to go to 600MB/s in 2007):


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCSI#Ultra-640

This has been hashed out many times over the years in comp.periph.scsi 
(it used to be IDE versus SCSI, not it's (S)ATA versus SCSI). A search 
through the archives would probably return many results.


The SCSI FAQ [1] would also probably be useful. Specifically the 
questions:


QUESTION: What are the pros and cons regarding SCSI vs IDE/ATA ?
http://home.comcast.net/~SCSIguy/SCSI_FAQ/scsifaq.html#_Hlk407004722

QUESTION:Should I spend the extra money on SCSI or just get IDE?
http://home.comcast.net/~SCSIguy/SCSI_FAQ/scsifaq.html#_Hlk407091459

QUESTION:Why do SCSI disks cost so much more than IDE/ATA disks?
http://home.comcast.net/~SCSIguy/SCSI_FAQ/scsifaq.html#_SCSI_Cost002

[1] http://www.scsifaq.org/

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Re: ACL not supported on 5.4?

[David Magda]

On Jun 11, 2005, at 19:08, Brandon Fosdick wrote:


Are handbook bugs handled through send-pr like everything else?


Yes, use the docs category.

There's also a web interface:

http://www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html

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Re: RAID-1 as back-up

[David Magda]

On Jun 4, 2005, at 18:41, Karl Denninger wrote:


Having an offsite copy is just good common sense.


Best to make it an explicit comment. As the saying goes, common sense 
often isn't (common). :)


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Re: RAID-1 as back-up

[David Magda]

On Jun 3, 2005, at 18:50, Karl Denninger wrote:

As with all backup strategies (absent write-once media in SOME cases) 
if the
media is PHYSICALLY connected to the machine and it is hacked it is 
possible
for a hacker to scribble on THAT as well.  This is no more likely, 
however,


Or a voltage spike to fry it (the OP has a UPS, right?). Or if there is 
some flooding it will scramble things as well.


Regardless of media you use, make sure there is at least one back up 
off site. I've heard of some insurance companies not paying out the 
business continuation payments since there was no off site data (it was 
a condition in the agreement / contract).


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Re: Why Move . . .

[David Magda]

On May 28, 2005, at 15:56, Claus Guttesen wrote:


whatever. The ports-collection will take care of dependencies.
Upgrading is done by portupgrade zsh for instance.


Just a small hint: personally I tend to always use the -b option to 
create a backup copy of the previous version (usually saved in 
/var/tmp).


This way if your testing (!) didn't catch some issues you can go back 
to the exact (more or less) environment you had before the upgrade. 
After a little while you can then delete the backed up version to 
reclaim space and keep things tidy.


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Re: gmirror

[David Magda]

On May 14, 2005, at 09:16, Pawel Jakub Dawidek wrote:
This is the way RAID1 works. Try to imagine how disk's heads are 
moving -
there will be no speed-up in sequential reads, this is not RAID0.

Mirror characteristics are:
- the same speed for sequential reads as for one disk;
- the same speed for sequential/random write as for one disk;
- double speed of one disk for random reads;
The following paper describes the I/O characteristics of various RAID 
schemes:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/chen89evaluation.html
The following two may also be of some interest:
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/chen90maximizing.html
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/219910.html
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Re: gmirror

[David Magda]

On May 14, 2005, at 10:48, Vladimir Dzhivsanoff wrote:
On 5/14/05, Pawel Jakub Dawidek [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
There is my tool in ports (benchmarks/raidtest/) which does what you 
want.
The README file wasn't moved to ports, IIRC, you can find it here:

big thanks, Pawel
You may also want to check out Bonnie and Bonnie++. They're fairly 
standard I/O benchmark programs that are a staple in measuring 
performance. Bonnie is in the Ports tree.

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Re: Kernel NTP flipping between FLL and PLL modes

[David Magda]

On Apr 6, 2005, at 07:04, Bob Bishop wrote:
I'm currently runnning a 5.3 with the ntpd from 5.2.1 (ie version 
4.1.1 not 4.2.0); looks good so far, I'll report back after a sensible 
interval.
You may also want to poke your head into comp.protocols.time.ntp with 
this issue. Some of the designers and programmers hang out there 
(there's also a mailing list that's gatewayed to the newsgroup). 
www.ntp.org has more info on all of this.

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Re: Headless install with 5.X floppies not possible?

[David Magda]

On Apr 2, 2005, at 09:45, Ralph Hempel wrote:
I haven't tried it with 5.x, but here's how I modify
the CD to allow headless installs for 4.x
http://www.hempeldesigngroup.com/embedded/stories/ 
bdgFreeBSDHeadless.html
Wouldn't is be better to simply use the -P option instead of -h?  
From boot(8) on my FreeBSD 4.x system:

 -Pprobe the keyboard.  If no keyboard is  
found, the
   -D and -h options are automatically set.

The following is in the BUGS section of boot(8):
 Due to space constraints, the keyboard probe initiated by the -P  
option
 is simply a test that the BIOS has detected an ``extended''  
keyboard.  If
 an ``XT/AT'' keyboard (with no F11 and F12 keys, etc.) is  
attached, the
 probe will fail.

This way if there's a keyboard, then there's presumably a screen, so  
the 'regular' way of using the console will be used. If there's no  
keyboard then serial console will be activated. This is how Sun  
hardware works by default and it works quite well I find.

Are there any major issues with making this the default for x86 (and  
amd64?) for future releases?

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Re: Kernel NTP flipping between FLL and PLL modes

[David Magda]

On Apr 1, 2005, at 05:45, Peter Jeremy wrote:
Any suggestions as to why this is happening?  (And how I can stop
it regularly flipping)
I don't think this is really an issue. It may be annoying to see it in 
the logs, but NTPv4 uses each algorithm when it's appropriate to get 
the most accurate time. Since network conditions change, the way NTP 
has to  deal with them changes since it queries other NTP servers over 
the network.

This was actually freebsd-questions last year and one response pointed 
to this paper:

http://www.eecis.udel.edu/~mills/database/papers/allan.pdf
You may want to check-out the the netgroup comp.protocols.time.ntp if 
you want to ask the experts (and authors) on NTP.

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Re: Need really cheap IDE mirroring PCI controlled for FreebBSD 4.10

[David Magda]

On Mar 3, 2005, at 19:20, Emanuel Strobl wrote:
If you consider upgrading to 5.4 you can use any onboard chipset or 
cheap
controller card with some geomclasses, namely g_mirror. It's fantastic 
and
the only stateful mirror solution I know. And you can mirror only 
parts of
your disk, or mirror across 3 drives aso. The power of geom :)
This can be done with 4.x. From atacontrol(8):
 create   Create a type ATA RAID.  The type can be RAID0 (stripe), 
RAID1
  (mirror), RAID0+1 or SPAN (JBOD).  In case the RAID has a 
RAID0
  component, the interleave must be specified in number of 
sec-
  tors.  The RAID will be created of the individual disks 
named
  disk0 ... diskN.

  Although the ATA driver allows for creating an ATA RAID 
on disks
  with any controller, there are restrictions.  It is only 
possi-
  ble to boot on an array if it is either located on a 
``real''
  ATA RAID controller like the Promise or Highpoint 
controllers,
  or if the RAID declared is of RAID1 or SPAN type; in case 
of a
  SPAN, the partition to boot must reside on the first disk 
in the
  SPAN.

Vinum(8) is also available on 4.x.
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Re: Any hosting companies offering FreeBSD 5.3 yet?

[David Magda]

On Feb 26, 2005, at 04:28, John Pettitt wrote:
I'm thinking about moving one of my servers to a new home (it's
currently at servepath.com on a FreeBSD 5.0 box) - does anybody know of
a reputable hosting company that's offering 5.3 boxes?
Most places have x86 servers, does anyone know of companies that can 
give you SPARC-based systems? Not sure how well FreeBSD would run, but 
Solaris (obviously), NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux would run.

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Re: Save the Demon!

[David Magda]

On Feb 8, 2005, at 18:31, Thomas T. Veldhouse wrote:
Can this be true?  Are they really looking to kill the FreeBSD demon?
It's daemon, not demon.
  :)
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Re: Adjusting time on a secured FreeBSD machine.

[David Magda]

On Feb 2, 2005, at 16:56, Eli K. Breen wrote:
Lastly this machine is in production and cannot be rebooted.
Stop the NTP daemon and restart it so that it uses the -x option. 
From ntpd(8):

 -x  Normally, the time is slewed if the offset is less than 
the step
 threshold, which is 128 ms by default, and stepped if 
above the
 threshold.  This option forces the time to be slewed in 
all
 cases.  If the step threshold is set to zero, all offsets 
are
 stepped, regardless of value and regardless of the -x 
option.  In
 general, this is not a good idea, as it bypasses the 
clock state
 machine which is designed to cope with large time and 
frequency
 errors Note: Since the slew rate is limited to 0.5 ms/s, 
each
 second of adjustment requires an amortization interval of 
2000 s.
 Thus, an adjustment of many seconds can take hours or 
days to
 amortize.  This option can be used with the -q option.
When you restart it make sure it's done with all the CLI options it has 
now, with the addition of the -x.

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Re: clock running fast

[David Magda]

On Dec 30, 2004, at 15:58, Federico Galvez-Durand Besnard wrote:
Your NTPD will never be stable with a wrong localtime setting.
NTP does not care about local time. All values that NTP uses are in 
UTC: local time is a function of the operating system and is not used 
when calculating time values.

Another place to ask questions would be the Usenet group:
comp.protocols.time.ntp
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Re: Large port updates

[David Magda]

On Dec 7, 2004, at 12:38, Wolfgang Zenker wrote:
you can use /usr/local/etc/pkgtools.conf to tell portupgrade which 
options
to use when upgrading a certain port. I usually check the makefile of 
ports
When using portupgrade(1), are Makefile.local files consulted?
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Re: 4.x can't read 5.x dump?

[David Magda]

On Dec 3, 2004, at 21:03, Adrian Wontroba wrote:
On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 02:36:09PM +, Ceri Davies wrote:
Should I expect a dump taken from 4.X to be restorable on 5.X 
though?
Yes.
Phew.
I didn't even think about the possibility of dump not being forwards
compatible (8-(
Maybe a note should be added to the dump(8) man page in the 5.x and 
HEAD branches noting this fact? At the very least an entry in UPDATING 
perhaps?

It seems obvious once you think about it, but things tend to just 
work with compatibility with FreeBSD that you take it for granted. :

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Re: Maximum uptime 497 days?

[David Magda]

On Jun 28, 2004, at 11:06, Matt Douhan wrote:
why ?
they may not be public machines at all and be isolated to an 
environment where
security is not the primary concern
Have you not seen the SSH exploit in The Matrix Reload?!?! : How do 
you know some evil-doer wouldn't use an exploit from an internal 
system? Heck, Slammer nailed a couple of networks (e.g., ATM) that were 
supposedly secure in protected networks. No telling how a worm may jump 
fire/airwalls.

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Re: how to interpret crash?

[David Magda]

On May 26, 2004, at 17:34, Robert Watson wrote:
[...]
This is a NULL pointer dereference in some piece of code.  The 
instruction
pointer is 0xc0230fee, which if you have a kernel with debugging 
symbols,
you can convert into a source file and line number (see the handbook 
for
[...]
Currently debugging kernels are not installed by default. Would it be 
possible to add a flag in make.conf to allow a kernel.debug to be 
installed along side the regular kernel? This way people can set things 
up once and not having to worry about digging around for a kernel with 
symbols if a panic should occur.

I know there's there's an installkernel.debug target under /usr/src, 
but I'm unclear as to what it does. Does it install both the regular 
and debugging kernels, or just the debugging one?

Just a suggestion.
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Re: update strategies

[David Magda]

Mike Hoskins [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:

 I often build things like BIND from ports so I can portupgrade as needed
 without building world.  In many cases I think using ports makes sense,
[...]

You don't have to rebuild world:

# cd /usr/src/usr.sbin/named
# make
# make install

should work fine. The resultant binary after the 'make' is in the
/usr/obj hierachy. 

-- 
David Magda dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca
Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well 
under the new. -- Niccolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_, Chapter VI

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booting old kernel (Re: panics after upgrading to -STABLE Aug 9, 2002)

[David Magda]

You said:

  Could someone put the word out when this issue is fixed? This problem
  just hosed my web server after I forgot the prime directive: test on
  a non-critical machine.

You can go back to the old kernel (/kernel.old). When you boot, you get
the twrily. Hit space.

If you do the command 'lsmod' at the prompt you will see kernel with
some info after it. There may be some other kernel modules loaded as
well.

Type the command 'unload' and do a 'lsmod' again. You should not get
anything back.

Type in 'load /kernel.old' to load the old kernel into memory. 

You can now do a 'boot' to boot into multi-user mode, or 'boot -s' to go
into single-user mode.

This procedure worked for me. YMMV.

Further commands are available in the loader(8) man page. You can find
the man page online [1].

[1] http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=loader

-- 
David Magda dmagda at ee.ryerson.ca
Because the innovator has for enemies all those who have done well under
the old conditions, and lukewarm defenders in those who may do well 
under the new. -- Niccolo Machiavelli, _The Prince_, Chapter VI

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