Tag: FreeBSD

The return of the FreeBSD desktop

I have a confession to make: I haven’t used FreeBSD as a desktop OS for years. The reason is twofold:

  1. Since 2005, my work has required me to run Linux (Debian and Ubuntu at Linpro, RedHat at the University of Oslo) and, briefly, Windows at Kongsberg Maritime. I eventually stopped using stationary computers, resorting instead to a (company-provided) laptop running either Ubuntu, or Windows with Ubuntu in VirtualBox.
  2. More importantly, around the time I started at Linpro, it became increasingly difficult to maintain a FreeBSD desktop. The modularization of X.org and the increasing complexity of desktop environments mean that the number of packages required for a complete desktop system has grown from a bit over 100 to well over 600 (in addition to the kernel and base operating system, which is monolithic in FreeBSD). The FreeBSD ports system does not scale well, and the lack of a proper binary update procedure makes it almost impossible to keep that many packages up-to-date.

This is about to change. Continue reading “The return of the FreeBSD desktop”

On testing

Last fall, I wrote a completely new configuration parser for OpenPAM Lycopsida. Although the new parser was far more robust than the one it replaced, it was large, unwieldy, and suffered from a number of issues relating to whitespace handling, which stemmed from reusing some old code which unfortunately was thoroughly documented and therefore could not be easily modified. So I decided to rewrite it again, from scratch this time.

Then I did what I should have done last fall but didn’t: I wrote some unit tests. And of the first dozen or so tests I came up with, three failed, revealing two different bugs—one of them fairly serious.

There’s a lesson in here somewhere…

Downtime

I haven’t been able to read email sent to des@des.no or des@freebsd.org for five days, due to a series of unfortunate incidents involving dodgy power supplies and the fragility of ZFS boot in FreeBSD. Work and other duties prevented me from addressing the issue in a more timely manner, but I am now regaining control. Luckily, neither my ~30 GB IMAP spool nor any other data was lost, nor did my backup MX bounce any mail. My IMAP server is now back up with a small UFS SU+J boot / root partition instead of ZFS. I am still unable to read email, but that should be fixed within 24 hours.

I also uncovered an annoying but luckily not fatal bug in the Cyrus IMAP server. When TLS is configured, the IMAP daemon stores state for each TLS session in a DB file. If that file is corrupted, the server will start, but it will refuse any incoming IMAP or LMTP connections, and will instead spit out a stream of completely unhelpful error messages. The only recourse is to delete the TLS session state database; I set up an rc script to do that at boot time, so hopefully this won’t bite me again.

ZFS-to-ZFS backups

ZFS has a couple of very useful functions, zfs send and zfs receive, which allow you to serialize a complete ZFS dataset and recreate it in a different location. They can also be used to serialize a delta between two snapshots and apply that delta to a previously created copy of the dataset. You see where I’m going with this… That’s right, incremental backups of a ZFS dataset or even an entire pool to a different ZFS dataset or pool. Continue reading “ZFS-to-ZFS backups”

More Advanced Format drives: Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen and Seagate Barracuda Green

I’ve acquired a couple more 2 TB Advanced Format drives: a Seagate Barracuda Green (ST2000DL003) and a Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen (HD204UI, no data sheet available online). Continue reading “More Advanced Format drives: Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen and Seagate Barracuda Green”