Category Archives: FreeBSD Administration

MySQL innodb buffer pool size issues

Posted on February 5, 2012 by danmassey99

I’m currently archiving some database records from our AVS logging platform. My previous technique was to rename the logging table and create a new one, leaving the renamed table to be cut up as required.  I had to do it … Continue reading →

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MIMEDefang – processing the valid users list ( filter_recipient() )

Posted on February 5, 2012 by danmassey99

I’m rebuilding our spam scanning platform at the moment and making some changes/improvements along the way. One of our issues was that we want to show customers ‘just how bad it is’ without spam scanning and so would like to … Continue reading →

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FreeBSD8.2 to FreeBSD9.0 upgrade – ssh key issue

Posted on January 12, 2012 by danmassey99

Well in a desperate attempt to get ahead of the curve, I decided to update to FreeBSD 9.0 RELEASE before I put my new mailout servers into production. All has gone well except that on boot I get the following … Continue reading →

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OpenSSL Creating a CSR with Additional names

Posted on January 11, 2012 by danmassey99

As part of the new bailout project here at Gconnect, I needed an SSL cert with an additional domain in it. the first is the name of the server, the second is the name of the cluster. In order to … Continue reading →

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FreeBSD & Carp – failover and load balancing

Posted on January 7, 2012 by danmassey99

FreeBSD supports CARP (Common Address Redundancy Protocol) and has done for many years now. We’ve been using it here at Gconnect as part of our ‘Mailout’ system with no issues at all and it’s served use well since FreeBSD version … Continue reading →

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Testing SMTP-AUTH from the command line

Posted on January 4, 2012 by danmassey99

I’m building a new pair of ‘mail-relay’ servers for customers to mail out through. Customers can only use SMTP-AUTH to send mail, but i needed a method of testing the mechanism. Actually I’ll be using MySQL based usernames and passwords, … Continue reading →

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Resetting file permissions for WordPress

Posted on January 2, 2012 by danmassey99

WordPress seems to be a minefield when it comes to file permissions. Sometimes we just want to start again and reset the files back to a nice safe setup. Here is my 3 liner to reset  directory permissions back to … Continue reading →

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Sloppy File Handling – Perl

Posted on December 15, 2011 by danmassey99

When reading around the subject of file handling in Perl its easy to get sloppy, phrases like ‘automatic cleanup’ and the like lull us into believing that the close statement is just a ‘nice to have’. Well this burnt me … Continue reading →

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Synchronising Nameservers (Bind + FreeBSD) with Perl

Posted on December 11, 2011 by danmassey99

A funny thing happened to a colleague’s name servers the other day. Whilst very diligent in almost every respect when it comes to failover, redundancy, etc, etc he was bitten by a simple yet overlooked  issue. We all synchronise name … Continue reading →

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FreeBSD ZFS Deduplication

Posted on November 11, 2011 by danmassey99

Time to prove or disprove the ZFS dedup capabilities. First its important to understand that as with compression, if we change the settings on the storage block then only new data written to that area will be de-duped or compressed. … Continue reading →

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