Replacing a broken drive on FreeBSD ZFS

These days, one of the drives on one of my machines started developing bad habits of reallocating blocks which is an early sign that drive might go bad. To prevent such misfortune I decided to replace it with a new one. Once the old drive was yanked out and new one was put into the machine (there are other ways, but I was forced to do it this way) it was only left to partition the new drive and add it to appropriate places....

December 19, 2017 · 4 min · Ivan Tomica

Moving /home to another ZFS dataset

When I set up ZFS on my main rig I was kind of doing it “fast as possible” and haven’t paid attention to much details. Recently, I wanted to customize my setup a bit so here’s how I migrated my /home to another ZFS dataset. Setup was as follows: There is ZFS pool called storage composed of two mirrored vdevs One vdev is 2x2TB drives while the other one is 2TB drive and 1,5TB drive....

November 20, 2017 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Installing Mastodon on FreeBSD

Here’s the link to the excellent guide on how to install Mastodon instance on FreeBSD. If you’re doing it in FreeBSD Jail you may find use for “Installing PostgreSQL in FreeBSD jail” article.

October 9, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Fix delete key in CSH or TCSH

CSH is the default shell for root user on FreeBSD system. Basic usage is pretty much the same as any other shell like bash, zsh, fish or whatever. Until you try to execute some bash specific for loops, or attempt to use Delete key. Whaaaat? - Yes, apparently delete doesn’t give the correct character in csh and just prints ~. I don’t know if that’s xterm (or xterm compatible) terminal thing or just a csh thing but it doesn’t matter....

October 6, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

GNOME Shell freezes on log out

So I’ve been battling with this issue for quite some time now. Every time I try to log out of Gnome Shell it simply freezes for anywhere between 10 and 30 seconds or so. This has been grinding my gears and finally I’ve stumbled upon this reddit post. And you know what? Turns out they are right! Removing Caffeine extension immediately resolves this issue.

September 29, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Installing POP!_OS GTK theme on Fedora

Install sassc which is a dependency for building assets: sudo dnf install sassc Clone GIT repository: git clone https://github.com/system76/pop-gtk-theme.git Switch directory and build the themes: cd pop-gtk-theme make make assets Finally, install the themes: sudo make install You need root privileges for that as themes get installed to /usr/share/themes directory.

September 1, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

Minecraft server in FreeBSD Jail

To run latest Minecraft 1.12.1 (as of this writing) within FreeBSD Jail you need few things. First of, you need to install Java 8: pkg install openjdk8 openjdk8-jre After Java is installed, you’ll notice that there’s a warning like: This OpenJDK implementation requires fdescfs(5) mounted on /dev/fd and procfs(5) mounted on /proc. If you have not done it yet, please do the following: mount -t fdescfs fdesc /dev/fd mount -t procfs proc /proc To make it permanent, you need the following lines in /etc/fstab: fdesc /dev/fd fdescfs rw 0 0 proc /proc procfs rw 0 0 This obviously needs to be done on the host system level as it is not allowed within Jail....

August 28, 2017 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Sync messages across IRC clients with ZNC ClientBuffer plugin

One of the main reasons for setting up ZNC bouncer for me was to be able to have same IRC account on multiple computers and have messages synced across them. This isn’t “default functionality” so you need to install additional ClientBuffer plugin. To install the module on ZNC installed from binary package on FreeBSD you need to: Fetch the module fetch –no-verify-peer https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jpnurmi/znc-clientbuffer/master/clientbuffer.cpp Build module znc-buildmod clientbuffer.cpp Copy module to ZNC library directory cp clientbuffer....

August 13, 2017 · 1 min · Ivan Tomica

ZNC with Let’sEncrypt

I’ve recently set up ZNC - an IRC bouncer, to help me stay logged in on IRC. Although I’m not yet done with the whole setup, I’ve decided to add a valid certificate. Of course, I use Let’s Encrypt for this purpose. To issue a certificate you can use: certbot certonly --standalone -d DOMAIN -n -m YOUREMAIL --agree-tos Certificate for the ZNC service on FreeBSD is located at: /usr/local/etc/znc/znc.pem and it’s structured like:...

August 1, 2017 · 2 min · Ivan Tomica

Ezjail not creating snapshots

July 18, 2017 · 0 min · Ivan Tomica