Increasing the size of the boot partition of FreeBSD with root on ZFS

Posted on October 25, 2017 by taliz

In a previous article I migrated my system to root on ZFS, that it also boots from.
When I did that the recommended size was 64K, however with FreeBSD 11 that is too small so to be able to upgrade I need to increase it in size.
I’ve seen some articles say that you need to remove and recreate the pool to do it, but I figured there must be an easier way…

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Automate UCS firmware upgrade for VMware vSphere clusters

Posted on December 30, 2016 by taliz

I found plenty of posts with scripts that automated the firmware upgrade for UCS servers running VMware ESXi. I did however not think they were “safe” enough, so I wrote my own.
It will update the firmware of all the hosts in the specified cluster, one host at a time.
It requires UCS Powertool 2.x and VMware PowerCLI 6.x. It logs the relevant steps with time stamps, so you’ll know whats happening.

It does the following:
1. Get the ESXi-hosts in the cluster to work in.
2. Dismounts VMware tools(would prevent putting a host in maintenance mode) on VMs running on the host.
3. Takes the first(added to the cluster, not name) host and puts it in maintenance mode.
4. Records the MAC address of vmnic0 for that host.
5. Shuts down the host.
6. Checks in UCS Manager which Service Profile matches that MAC address.
7. Verifies that the matching server is powered off.
8. Applies the firmware policy specified.
9. Acknowledges the reboot.
10. Waits until the server operational states goes from “config” to “ok”.
11. Waits for the server to reconnect in vCenter.
12. Exits the host from maintenance mode.
13. Repeats the process from step 2 with the rest of the hosts in the cluster.

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Making Mosh work for OSX and FreeBSD

Posted on October 17, 2014 by taliz

Like many others, it seems, I got the dreaded “mosh-server needs a UTF-8 native locale to run.” when trying to use mosh from my OSX laptop to my FreeBSD server.

I tried the stuff google suggested, but nothing worked. What eventually solved the problem for me was adding the following to .bash_profile on my OSX client:

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FreeBSD and Intel Bay Trail

Posted on June 24, 2014 by taliz

My old Core 2 Duo server from 2007 has been with me for a little too long now. Its an old workstation from a previous job. But I haven’t really found any alternatives that fit both my requirements and budget, until now.

My requirements were a passively cooled(low TDP) mITX board with an integrated CPU(with decent performance), at least 4 SATA ports,  an HDMI port and DDR3 SO-DIMM slots. For no more than about 80 USD. Until Intel released the Bay Trail CPU family there was nothing that could fill those requirements. So when I saw that Asrock released their Q1900-ITX board, I ordered one.

Bleeding edge hardware and FreeBSD requires some tweaking though…

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Binary telldus-core packages for OpenWRT

Posted on December 15, 2013 by taliz

Here I will post ipk packages of telldus-core built for various OpenWRT architectures(they are built for Attitude Adjustment 12.09). I have detailed how to build it yourself in a previous post, but it is a bit complicated to do. Especially if you’re not used to compiling stuff, or Linux at all. So the packages below can simply be SCP’d to your router and then installed by running: Continue reading →

Posted in Linux, OpenWRT, Tellstick | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 10 Comments

Migrating an existing FreeBSD installation to root on ZFS

Posted on December 12, 2013 by taliz

There are plenty of guides and howtos on how to install FreeBSD onto a ZFS root.
It’s on the wiki at https://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS for example.
But I could not find any guides on how to migrate an existing installation to a ZFS root.
It turns out it wasn’t that difficult to achieve.
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FreeBSD boot stuck on “trying to mount root from”

Posted on December 12, 2013 by taliz

When I tried to boot into my new ZFS root, the boot went fine up until it was going to mount the root filesystem.
It just stuck on “trying to mount root from zfs:twotb/root” and then absolutely nothing happend. I left it for 10-15 minutes but nothing, no error message or anything. I tried a zillion things and googled like mad, but I only found one similar problem. That guy didn’t find the root cause though, but claimed he fiddled some with fstab and then it started to work. That did’nt help me.
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Posted in FreeBSD, ZFS | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Plugging a Tellstick directly in a (OpenWRT) router

Posted on November 30, 2013 by taliz

If you have a Dovado router you can supposedly plug in a Tellstick from the get go.
But for any other router, some work is required. This is another post mostly for my own reference, but hopefully it’ll be useful for you too.
First of, you should install OpenWRT on your router(it obviously needs to be one with a USB port). That way you can build and install whatever software you want. And since Telldus provides a source package that you can compile, that makes it a lot easier.

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Posted in Android, Automation, Linux, OpenWRT, Tellstick | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 11 Comments

EMC SRDF SRA 5.1(& 5.5) install issues – solution

Posted on April 18, 2013 by taliz

Tried installing EMC SRDF SRA 5.1 on my new VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.1 server. It installed fine, but apparantly didn’t create an EMC Symmetrix folder under the sra-folder as it should. After a bit of googling and searching the forums on Powerlink I gave up and contacted EMC support. Turns out it currently doesn’t work when SRM is installed somewhere other than C: and they had no solution to it.
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Posted in VMware | Tagged , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

Hiding Apple-folders from XBMC

Posted on October 23, 2012 by taliz

I’m browsing my mediashare via CIFS/SMB, and also from my Mac.
The Mac creates some temporary folders and files everywhere, which aren’t visible on the Mac but are there when I browse in XBMC. Quite annoying. Removing them won’t help as they reappear, so figured I’d hide them instead.
This is accomplished by adding the following line to smb.conf and restarting samba.

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