I upgraded some of my virtual machines during my summer holiday. They are all running ZFS, but were neglected for so long that they were still updating their source and ports trees using CVSup. I began pondering how to migrate to Subversion with the least fuzz possible. Luckily, I had anticipated the switch to Subversion, […]

Read More → Moving ZFS datasets around eases the transition from CVSup to Subversion

I’ve been experimenting with FreeBSD 10.0-CURRENT and an alternative ZFS layout for more than a year. The idea is to have a simple way of switching between boot environments. Thus, you have the opportunity of reverting to a previous boot environment without resorting to snapshots and rollbacks as you would with a sole boot environment. […]

Read More → Alternative ZFS layout

These messages appeared in the kern log file the other day: Jun 21 22:06:06 enterprise kernel: [282015] (ada1:ahcich1:0:0:0): WRITE_FPDMA_QUEUED. ACB: 61 18 38 ce 72 40 0b 00 00 00 00 00 Jun 21 22:06:06 enterprise kernel: [282015] (ada1:ahcich1:0:0:0): CAM status: Uncorrectable parity/CRC error Jun 21 22:06:06 enterprise kernel: [282015] (ada1:ahcich1:0:0:0): Retrying command Jun 21 […]

Read More → Are one of the disks beginning to fail?

FreeBSD is approaching 20 years! I guess it all depends on what you regard as FreeBSD’s true birth. The baptism, the first commit to the CVS repository, the first release, or something else? The first commit to the CVS repository was done on “Sat Jun 12 14:49:13 1993 UTC”. That’s 20 years and 6 days […]

Read More → Happy nameday, FreeBSD!

Today, I decided to upgrade PostgreSQL from 9.1.5 to 9.2.0 on one of my computers. Ironically, PostgreSQL 9.2.1 was released today, but until the FreeBSD ports hierarchy catches up, the most recent version available is 9.2.0, unless of course you want to do everything yourself.

Read More → Upgrading PostgreSQL from 9.1.5 to 9.2.0

Not long ago it was announced that the FreeBSD ports tree will cease exporting its Subversion repository to CVS, and subsequently any use of CVSup for updating the ports tree will be discontinued by February 28th 2013. FreeBSD’s main source tree repository has been served by Subversion since late May 2008 with every commit done […]

Read More → Making your own FreeBSD Subversion repository mirror

Someone named “Edward M” posted on the freebsd-questions mailing list a question of when should we create a ZFS filesystem. I didn’t reply to any of the messages, but I decided to write this post expressing my view. In short, whenever a part of the filesystem hierarchy exhibits different characteristics, create one or more ZFS […]

Read More → When to create a ZFS filesystem?