Migrating drives and zpool between hosts, OpenBSD in 2019, Dragonfly’s new zlib and dhcpcd, Batch renaming images and resolution with awk, a rant on the X11 ICCCM selection system, hammer 2 emergency space mode, and more.
Headlines
Migrating drives and the zpool from one host to another. (https://dan.langille.org/2019/10/26/migrating-drives-and-the-zpool-from-one-host-to-another/)
Today is the day.
Today I move a zpool from an R710 into an R720. The goal: all services on that zpool start running on the new host.
Fortunately, that zpool is dedicated to jails, more or less. I have done some planning about this, including moving a poudriere on the R710 into a jail.
Now it is almost noon on Saturday, I am sitting in the basement (just outside the server room), and I’m typing this up.
In this post:
FreeBSD 12.0
Dell R710 (r710-01)
Dell R720 (r720-01)
drive caddies from eBay and now I know the difference between SATA and SATAu
PLEASE READ THIS first: Migrating ZFS Storage Pools (https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19253-01/819-5461/gbchy/index.html)
OpenBSD in 2019 (https://blog.habets.se/2019/10/OpenBSD-in-2019.html)
I’ve used OpenBSD on and off since 2.1. More back then than in the last 10 years or so though, so I thought I’d try it again.
What triggered this was me finding a silly bug in GNU cpio that has existed with a “FIXME” comment since at least 1994. I checked OpenBSD to see if it had a related bug, but as expected no it was just fine.
I don’t quite remember why I stopped using OpenBSD for servers, but I do remember filesystem corruption on “unexpected power disconnections” (even with softdep turned on), which I’ve never really seen on Linux.
That and that fewer things “just worked” than with Linux, which matters more when I installed more random things than I do now. I’ve become a lot more minimalist. Probably due to less spare time. Life is better when you don’t run things like PHP (not that OpenBSD doesn’t support PHP, just an example) or your own email server with various antispam tooling, and other things.
This is all experience from running OpenBSD on a server. On my next laptop I intend to try running OpenBSD on the dektop, and will see if that more ad-hoc environment works well. E.g. will gnuradio work? Lack of other-OS VM support may be a problem.
Verdict
Ouch, that’s a long list of bad stuff. Still, I like it. I’ll continue to run it, and will make sure my stuff continues working on OpenBSD.
And maybe in a year I’ll have a review of OpenBSD on a laptop.
News Roundup
New zlib, new dhcpcd (https://www.dragonflydigest.com/2019/10/29/23683.html)
zlib and dhcpcd are both updated in DragonFly… but my quick perusal of the commits makes it sound like bugfix only; no usage changes needed.
DHCPCD Commit: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-October/719768.html
ZLIB Commit: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/commits/2019-October/719772.html
Batch renaming images, including image resolution, with awk (https://victoria.dev/verbose/batch-renaming-images-including-image-resolution-with-awk/)
The most recent item on my list of “Geeky things I did that made me feel pretty awesome” is an hour’s adventure that culminated in this code:

$ file IMG* | awk 'BEGIN{a=0} {print substr($1, 1, length($1)-5),a++"_"substr($8,1, length($8)-1)}' | while read fn fr; do echo $(rename -v "s/$fn/img_$fr/g" *); done
IMG_20170808_172653_425.jpg renamed as img_0_4032x3024.jpg
IMG_20170808_173020_267.jpg renamed as img_1_3024x3506.jpg
IMG_20170808_173130_616.jpg renamed as img_2_3024x3779.jpg
IMG_20170808_173221_425.jpg renamed as img_3_3024x3780.jpg
IMG_20170808_173417_059.jpg renamed as img_4_2956x2980.jpg
IMG_20170808_173450_971.jpg renamed as img_5_3024x3024.jpg
IMG_20170808_173536_034.jpg renamed as img_6_4032x3024.jpg
IMG_20170808_173602_732.jpg renamed as img_7_1617x1617.jpg
IMG_20170808_173645_339.jpg renamed as img_8_3024x3780.jpg
IMG_20170909_170146_585.jpg renamed as img_9_3036x3036.jpg
IMG_20170911_211522_543.jpg renamed as img