I bought the ebook edition of FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS this June. While the authors’ intentions are good, the 2015-05-21 edition has some errors and mistakes. The table below is nothing more than an unofficial errata of said book. Beware, what you find below might be due to my lack of understanding FreeBSD, ZFS, or the […]

Read More → Unofficial errata: FreeBSD Mastery: ZFS

Download the required updates. Extract the XS*.xsupdate files. Transfer the XS*.xsupdate files to, say, /tmp/xsup on the master. Login on the XenServer console. Delete old log files in /var/log, e.g. /bin/rm /var/log/*.gz. Create if necessary, and change directory to /tmp/xsup. Run: Run: Delete the XS*.xsupdate files from /tmp/xsup. Shutdown the running VMs and restart each […]

Read More → Upgrading XenServer 6.2

A colleague came into my office claiming the camera in his Dell Latitude E5540 didn’t work. Here’s a link to the Dell Latitude E5540 Owner’s Manual. After a bit of troubleshooting, I removed the display bezel. Lo and behold, the camera connector was halfway out of its socket. Once I pressed the connector into place, […]

Read More → Loose camera connector in Dell Latitude E5540

FreeBSD gives the user an option of installing the file /usr/local/etc/screenrc with some sensible defaults along with GNU Screen, aka sysutils/screen. Among the defaults are a format string for the hardstatus line. It shows the date using yy/dd/mm notation and the time as a 12 hour clock. That may be fine in the English speaking […]

Read More → Adding 24 hour clock to FreeBSD’s hardstatus string for GNU Screen

When upgrading from one major version of FreeBSD to another, in my case from FreeBSD/amd64 stable/9 to FreeBSD/amd64 stable/10, it’s customary to upgrade the installed ports afterwards, beginning with ports-mgmt/pkg. I forcefully upgraded all installed ports using portupgrade -afpv, but the upgrade of lang/ruby21 failed miserably. I removed all traces of Ruby 2.1, i.e. ports-mgmt/portupgrade […]

Read More → Ascertaining installed ports for a specific architecture

Creating new BE’s using snapshots and clones can get messy with dependencies all over the place. I had an epiphany the other day, why not create a snapshot on the current dataset, send that snapshot to a new dataset within the same zpool (or elsewhere), and subsequently destroy the (two!) snapshots? Instant transfer of data, […]

Read More → Cloning a ZFS dataset using only zfs snapshot, zfs send, and zfs receive