HOWTO : Replace a failed disk drive in a FreeBSD ZFS pool

In this blog post, we will repair a broken ZFS pool from a FreeBSD server. The machine is running FreeBSD 9.2, but so long as your FreeBSD machine runs a ZFS enabled FreeBSD, all the commands in this article should work.

A little background on this machine. It's been in production for about four years now. It was originally installed with four 750 GB disk drives as a raidz2 pool. The OS has been upgraded several times and so is the disk drives (because that's what fails of course, hence this post). This is a ZFS-only machine built by following the ZFS only FreeBSD installation wiki with GPT formated disks.

Oracle Solaris 10 Kerberized SSH Configuration

If you manage Oracle Solaris 10 machines, you might want to configure your servers to accept Kerberos principals via SSH. The SSH that comes with Solaris 10 does not understand the same configurations as the OpenSSH one does. And Solaris has a little quirk that Linux and BSD don't.

If you don't already have a Kerberos infrastrucutre in place, then the first thing to do is to set one up. Read my other article HOWTO : Kerberos KDC with OpenLDAP 2.4 Back-End and SASL GSSAPI Authentication on CentOS 6.2 to learn how to create a Kerberos realm.

Howto Recover Lost Cisco Enable Password

In this blog post, we will recover from a lost Cisco switch enable password.

PC-BSD / FreeBSD Kerberos GNOME Graphical Login

A quick post just to show how to configure a PC-BSD or a FreeBSD workstation to run kinit(1) right when you login. In this example, the desktop machine is running PC-BSD 9.0 with the GNOME desktop.

Secure Backup & Recovery with rsnapshot, rssh and OpenSSH

Overview

Wee all need to backup our machines. But we also need to keep the data private and the backup procedure secured. In UNIX and Linux machines, we need to run the backup operation as root in order to read everything on the machines. But allowing remote connections as the root user is not exactly a good idea. So how to we proceed? We use rsnapshot(1) and rssh(1) together with OpenSSH to secure the whole process. Here's how to do it on CentOS 6.

In case you're running a heterogeneous network, please note that I've successfully configured this process on FreeBSD, PC-BSD, RedHat, Ubuntu, AIX and Solaris servers.

In this example, our backup server is called backup.company.com and is running CentOS 6 while the clients are :

1. The OpenLDAP server alice.company.com that we configured in several other blog posts and running CentOS 6.
2. A workstation machine called charlie.company.com running PC-BSD 9.0 (i.e. FreeBSD 9.0 :)

MacOS X 10.7 Time Machine Backup to FreeBSD Server with Netatalk

UPDATE : This documentation still works, but it uses netatalk version 2 and is more complex than using version 3. Please consider using this documentation using netatalk version 3 instead. 

If you backup your MacOS X 10.6 machine to a netatalk server, then you may have found that MacOS X 10.7 cannot backup to the same machine. Apparently, the major reason why it's now broken is a lack of « replay cache » which was introduced in AFP 3.3. So what you need to do is upgrade netatalk to version 2.2.x.

UPDATE : I've successfully this setup with MacOS X 10.8 and 10.9.

Let's configure a FreeBSD machine to serve as a Time Machine target for MacOS X 10.7. I'm using FreeBSD 8.2 as this is the production version. If you prefer using a Linux machine, then take a look at this blog post by Steffen L. Norgren.