I've updated my SNMP MIBs to support OpenBSD 4.9.

I used to have a machine sitting around that I would power up whenever I needed to build a new OpenBSD kernel or rebuild the source tree due to a patch or a new version of the OS being released. Eventually I moved that machine into a VirtualBox virtual machine running on my desktop. Recently I moved that VM into VMWare's free ESXi hypervisor running on some pretty decent hardware. It got me wondering how much I could lower compile times by adjusting how many vCPUs were allocated to the VM.

As a follow-on to my previous post about disabling plugins, this script will enable plugins from the shell.

Lately I've been working with a separate instance of my WordPress site for development and testing of plugins, my theme, etc. I have a helper script that orchestrates the pulling of files and copying of the database from the production server into the dev server. I found that it would be nice to disable certain plugins that I don't want running in the dev instance (ie, plugins that notify search indexes when new posts are made) from within this script.

One of the first things I wanted to do with my ESXi lab box was to simulate a hard drive failure to see what alarms would be raised by ESXi. This exercise doesn't serve any purpose in the "real world" where ESXi hosts are likely to be using shared storage in all but the most esoteric of installations but since my lab box isn't using shared storage I wanted to make sure I understood the behavior of ESXi during a drive failure. This post is also a guide to my future self should a drive fail for real :-).

It's been a long time since I've taken a run at getting Olive up and working. I wanted to take another stab at it and document how to get a working Olive installation using the latest JUNOS code. I also wanted to document how to get Olive up inside VMware ESXi since I hadn't actually done that before.

I recently built a VMware ESXi host at home. When I was researching the hardware, I learned there are a number of things to consider when choosing a RAID card for use under ESXi. This article covers those things and offers advice for anyone who is building a similar system.

As part of the recent hardware upgrade to my ZFS file server I replaced the motherboard. I'd never replaced the motherboard on an active Solaris system before and was curious whether it would be at the easy end of the spectrum (like OpenBSD is) or at the impossible end (like any recent version of Windows). This is what I learned.

I recently decided to indulge my inner geek by doing a hardware refresh on my home ZFS file server. The system had served me well since moving to ZFS from my previous system but there was room for improvement.

I recently had an issue with an OpenBSD firewall where the number of state table entries was hitting the default limit of 10,000. When this limit is reached, no new state entries can be created. If you're using "keep state", "modulate state" or "synproxy state" on your rules or if you're running OpenBSD 4.1 or newer (where "keep state" is the default on all rules) this could mean that:

• You cannot make new connections through the firewall
• You cannot make new connections to the firewall
• You cannot make new connections from the firewall

So.... if you hit the state table limit it's kinda bad, mmmkay?