Chillibear
A place for notes about stuff

FreeBSD

PORTSCOUT= limit:^1.4

It would appear you can set a regexp variable thus (for example): PORTSCOUT=limit:^1.4 In a ports Makefile to prevent portscout looking for newer versions, very useful if you need to put a legacy version in the tree.

Clone FreeBSD

Clone a running FreeBSD system to another disk. Source drive: ad0, target drive ad1 Prepare the target drive cd /tmp/ df -h > liveFSsizes bsdlabel da0s1 > liveSPsizes dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/da1 count=2 fdisk -BI /dev/da1 bsdlabel -B -w da1s1 bsdlabel -R da1s1 liveSPsizes cat liveSPsizes newfs -U /dev/da1s1a newfs -U /dev/da1s1d newfs -U /dev/da1s1e newfs [...]

Dell R210 power consumption

Just recording the power ratings I measured with this plug-in meter and a Dell R210 server. Firstly some base readings with no operating system installed and the machine powered up (with no power applied the Drac Express draws about 26W). No OS, with 2 Seagate 2.5″ drives, 2x4GB RAM, DVD, Drac Express: 60.75W No OS, [...]

Check GEOM Software RAID

I wanted a simple check to email me should my software RAID die on a server. Originally I started writing a simple ruby script based on a Perl script I found somewhere online (gmirror status has a very nice -s switch for a script friendly output). Then I realised that I could probably do what [...]

Sorting ls output by type

I was recently wondering if there was an easy way to list a directory on *NIX and have all the directories listed first together. A popular search engine to the rescue and the following site was located http://superuser.com/questions/19781/make-ls-sort-by-file-type-then-name. Now since I run the vastly wonderful FreeBSD and we errr, don’t have all those fancy Linux [...]

IPMI on FreeBSD

Just acquired a new Dell server along with it’s iDRAC 6 lights out management system (LOM). Now I know this LOM supports IPMI version 2 and I know FreeBSD is supports IPMI. I installed ipmitool from the ports collection, but I just could not get this local install of ipmitool to talk to the LOM, [...]

PHP unable to load GD

Another upgrade of PHP from the FreeBSD ports collection and another problem! Am I alone, well searching would appear to suggest not. I wonder why this one set of ports causes me so much trouble. Still getting used to the quirks now! Today’s problem concerned loading the GD graphics library. It produced the following error: [...]

Emergency backup before FreeBSD port upgrade

I recently saw a blog post with some tips for dealing with the FreeBSD ports tree. The tip I thought was particularly useful regarding creating binary backups (i.e. packages) of important ports before upgrading them, just in case you need to roll back by installing the package. pkg_create -b portname will create a package for [...]

FreeBSD 7 and Rails: undefined method `camelize’ for “app”:String

Okay, thought it was about time I had Rails installed on one of my FreeBSD boxes. So off to ports I trundle, two seconds later and I have Rails installed. Right time for a quick test app: []$ ruby -v ruby 1.8.7 (2009-04-08 patchlevel 160) [amd64-freebsd7] []$ rails -v Rails 2.3.4 []$ gem -v 1.3.5 [...]

Date and time on FreeBSD

Just a reminder for myself for the syntax to set the date and time on my FreeBSD systems. date yymmddhhmmss Where: yy : Year in two digit mm : Month (1-12) dd : Day (1-31) hh : Hours (0..23) mm : Minutes (0..59) ss : Seconds (0..61) Or you can just set the time like [...]

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