Episode Details
Back to Episodes
324: Emergency Space Mode
Description
Migrating drives and zpool between hosts, OpenBSD in 2019, Dragonfly’s new zlib and dhcpcd, Batch renaming images and resolution with awk, a rant on the X11 ICCCM selection system, hammer 2 emergency space mode, and more.
Headlines
Migrating drives and the zpool from one host to another.
Today is the day.
Today I move a zpool from an R710 into an R720. The goal: all services on that zpool start running on the new host.
Fortunately, that zpool is dedicated to jails, more or less. I have done some planning about this, including moving a poudriere on the R710 into a jail.
Now it is almost noon on Saturday, I am sitting in the basement (just outside the server room), and I’m typing this up.
In this post:
- FreeBSD 12.0
- Dell R710 (r710-01)
- Dell R720 (r720-01)
- drive caddies from eBay and now I know the difference between SATA and SATAu
OpenBSD in 2019
I’ve used OpenBSD on and off since 2.1. More back then than in the last 10 years or so though, so I thought I’d try it again.
What triggered this was me finding a silly bug in GNU cpio that has existed with a “FIXME” comment since at least 1994. I checked OpenBSD to see if it had a related bug, but as expected no it was just fine.
I don’t quite remember why I stopped using OpenBSD for servers, but I do remember filesystem corruption on “unexpected power disconnections” (even with softdep turned on), which I’ve never really seen on Linux.
That and that fewer things “just worked” than with Linux, which matters more when I installed more random things than I do now. I’ve become a lot more minimalist. Probably due to less spare time. Life is better when you don’t run things like PHP (not that OpenBSD doesn’t support PHP, just an example) or your own email server with various antispam tooling, and other things.
This is all experience from running OpenBSD on a server. On my next laptop I intend to try running OpenBSD on the dektop, and will see if that more ad-hoc environment works well. E.g. will gnuradio work? Lack of other-OS VM support may be a problem.
- Verdict
Ouch, that’s a long list of bad stuff. Still, I like it. I’ll continue to run it, and will make sure my stuff continues working on OpenBSD.
And maybe in a year I’ll have a review of OpenBSD on a laptop.
News Roundup
New zlib, new dhcpcd
zlib and dhcpcd are both updated in DragonFly… but my quick perusal of the commits makes it sound like bugfix only; no usage changes needed.
- DHCPCD Commit: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-October/719768.html
- ZLIB Commit: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-October/719772.html
Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk
The most recent item on my list of “Geeky things I did that made me feel pretty awesome” is an hour’s adventure that culminated in this code:
$ fi