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> FreeRADIUS on Debian
Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on June 01, 2008 at 02:30 local (server) time

The current package (version 2.0.4-2) is massively broken by default!  I'll have to admit, I spent way too long trying to figure this out.  To fix, do:

cp /etc/freeradius/sites-available/default /etc/freeradius/sites-enabled/default

…as described in this post.  I just submitted bug #483914 with the Debian folks.

Comments: 0
> Hey there, GINA
Posted by prox, from North Brunswick, on May 26, 2008 at 20:44 local (server) time

As reported on Slashdot and other news sources:

The Coalition for Genetic Fairness commends President George W. Bush for signing into law today the first civil rights legislation of the new millennium, the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). GINA is the first and only federal legislation that will provide protections against discrimination based on an individual's genetic information in health insurance coverage and employment settings.

This is especially interesting to me, since I read Crichton's Next a couple months ago…

Comments: 0
> Outages and oopses?
Posted by prox, from North Brunswick, on May 24, 2008 at 19:56 local (server) time

This past week has been a bad one for dax, the server that hosts this website (and a number of other things).

Short summary (warning: full disclosure)

On Saturday (5/18), dax rebooted three times due to the primary (boot) SATA disk being detached from the OS.  It's not the first time this has happened, and I've mentioned it several times in the past.  Unfortunately, the third time it rebooted I was in the middle of a ports upgrade, and the pkgdb was in the process of being rewritten.  Basically, almost everything in /var/db/pkg was destroyed, leaving me to either reinstall all my ports at the risk of this happening again, or finally asking for a hardware replacement (whole server or just disk, it didn't matter to me).  I submitted a ticket to the Voxel folks (where dax is hosted), on Saturday evening, and they scheduled a boot disk swap (and install of FreeBSD 7.0, amd64) on late Sunday evening.

Just to be on the safe side, on Sunday I picked up a 250GB Western Digital USB hard disk, and managed to back up (with the help of HPN-SSH) all of the home directories on dax from /usr/home, which amounted to about 181GiB.  In retrospect, I'm thinking that this drive might have been the best thing I bought all year.  Normally I just back up code for my website, MySQL databases, /etc, and some things in /usr/local.

On Sunday evening (that lasted to almost 0300 on Monday), Voxel attempted an install of FreeBSD 7.0 onto a new 320GB Western Digital disk.  Apparently there were some technical difficulties, because not only was AHCI disabled in the BIOS for the installation to succeed, but the PXE boot image was labeled incorrectly and I got the i386 version instead of the requested amd64 one.  Unfortunately, I only realized this on Tuesday evening, when I saw i386 scroll across the screen way too many times when doing a make buildkernel.  I submitted another ticket, and turned in for the night.

Fast forward to Thursday, when I received a message indicating dax (amd64) was ready to go, but unfortunately my data disk (/usr/home) had been accidently newfs'ed.  Since I was sitting in the airport, I didn't scream too loudly, but asked if the AHCI setting could be checked on again.  It was indeed still set to IDE compatibility mode, and was switched to AHCI mode after some changes to /etc/fstab.  Strangely, FreeBSD detects the disks as /dev/ad0 and /dev/ad1 in IDE mode, but /dev/ad8 and /dev/ad12 in AHCI mode.  I suppose that's due to the fact that the AHCI controller is logically separate, but I'm not sure.  Either way, dax was ready to go.

As compensation for the loss of data, Voxel is automatically giving me two full months of service, free (I pay $120/mo).  Not bad, I would have had to pry a deal like this out of other hosting providers.  I will still recommend them any day.

I spent part of Friday and today restoring all the data (rsync is still going for a couple things…), but dax is back up with FreeBSD 7.0 amd64, and all services have been restored. I enabled the ULE scheduler in the kernel configuration, since it's supposed to help with SMP systems, and is similar to Ingo's O(1) scheduler on GNU/Linux.  I doubt I will notice a difference, though.

Comments: 0
> FreeBSD 7.0, anyone?
Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on May 17, 2008 at 20:30 local (server) time

Since dax rebooted this evening with the following:

subdisk8: detached
ad8: detached
swap_pager: I/O error - pagein failed; blkno 31227,size 4096, error 6
[...]
Uptime: 137d2h4m5s
Cannot dump. No dump device defined.
Automatic reboot in 15 seconds - press a key on the console to abort
g_vfs_done():ad8s4d[WRITE(offset=128148439040, length=8192)]error = 6
Rebooting...

…I figure this is a good time to upgrade to FreeBSD 7.0!  (and hopefully it'll fix whatever problem is causing this?)

Comments: 0
> PMTUD MTR Patch
Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on May 15, 2008 at 01:38 local (server) time

I just can't get enough of these patches.  Here's another one I threw together tonight that implements PMTU detection for MTR:

                             My traceroute  [v0.72]
neodymium (0.0.0.0)                                    Thu May 15 01:17:41 2008
Keys:  Help   Display mode   Restart statistics   Order of fields   quit
                                       Packets               Pings
 Host                                Loss%   Snt   Last   Avg  Best  Wrst StDev
 1. 90.66.42.1                        0.0%    16    0.2   0.3   0.2   0.5   0.1
 2. 90.66.43.4 [PMTU: 1446]           0.0%    15    2.2   1.6   1.5   2.2   0.2
 3. 99.50.161.222                     0.0%    15   79.9  79.8  79.5  80.1   0.2
 4. 90.42.7.1                         0.0%    15   81.1  81.1  80.7  82.2   0.4
 5. 90.27.15.2                        0.0%    15   81.8  81.6  81.4  82.2   0.2
 6. 90.27.118.188                     0.0%    15   83.2  83.6  83.2  84.2   0.3

More information here, as always.

Comments: 0
> Debian OpenSSL Vulnerability
Posted by prox, from Charlotte, on May 13, 2008 at 14:56 local (server) time

It's not good when you see stuff like this pop up on IRC:

13:41 < unprompted> Throw out your ssh keys, debian users.

The official announcement:

Luciano Bello discovered that the random number generator in Debian's openssl package is predictable. This is caused by an incorrect Debian-specific change to the openssl package (CVE-2008-0166). As a result, cryptographic key material may be guessable.

Good thing my SSH keys were generated on a Gentoo system… I think.

Comments: 0
> Serious bugs?
Posted by prox, from Sarasota, on May 12, 2008 at 18:02 local (server) time

I love Debian:

serious bugs of texlive-base (2007-13 -> 2007-14) <pending>
 #477060 - texlive-base: license of amslatex is unclear

C'mon, folks.  How is an unclear license a serious bug?

Comments: 0
> Turtle Beach
Posted by prox, from Sarasota, on May 12, 2008 at 00:26 local (server) time

I took a nice walk on Turtle Beach last night, and caught a couple nice photos of the sunset:

Turtle Beach sunset

Comments: 0

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