Tag: FreeBSD

In case you’ve managed to overcome other issues with system unable to boot, disk size not updated then there might be still one problem left. Sometimes resizing with gpart works fine but file system resize does not. I’ve encountered such issue and frankly speaking I’m not quite sure what is root cause of it. Is says that file system is dirty and I should run fsck which can be executed from console selecting number 5 and then F letter. System reboots and makes file system check. It says that the file system is fine, so it’s quite confusing.

Solution for this one is to boot the system in single user mode, by selecting number 5 and S. This skips few additional things normally executed during multi user boot mode. Now you can run the following to expand file system:

service growfs onestart

This command normally should be able to do its job, but this time, system should be run in single user mode to overcome it.

Following previous struggles on pfSense FreeBSD on Azure. After resizing disk Microsoft starts at some point adding an another drive which is temporary one. I do not need this by any means. It seems that NetGate pfSense template is also not quite compatible with cloud-init as the platform tries to execute systemctl which is not present here.

The problem with this is that FreeBSD will not be able to pick which partition it should start from. Fix for this is pretty simple. Just go and edit /etc/fstab and instead of pointing to some virtual labels. In my case it was /dev/da0s2a. You can pick the proper one during boot procedure by pressing question mark. Load will list for you all the partitions available. Try at your best. In mine case, it was the first one from the list.

What causes the problem? Being not compatible with cloud-init, NetGate template is vulnerable to unpredictable changes from my personal perspective. But here we are in public cloud environment and we should not be suprised by that.

Recently I described how to increase drive, partition and filesystem on FreeBSD in Azure virtual machine. It turned out that this scenario was little bit different from a virtual machine running on top of VMware. First of all, with or without vm-tools I was not able to get updated drive size:

camcontrol rescan all

It gives messages that rescanning was successful, but actually it did not apply new values. However we can check new drive size with the following command:

camcontrol readcap da0 -h    # daX

If on your system you get same results, then you need to reboot.

There is also a difference of having swap space. First disable it:

cat /etc/fstab               # pick swap device to use
swapoff /dev/label/swap0     # as an example

Then remove swap partition as freebsd-ufs partition need to be a continuous space:

gpart delete -i 2 da0s1      # refer to gpart show 

Then as previously run resizing commands:

gpart resize -i X da0        # X would be probably 1
service growfs onestart

Now you are done.

I use NetGate pfSense+ version 22 based on FreeBSD 21. I encountered a problem of running out of disk space because of packet logging enable in Suricata. Out of a sudden there was high traffic and therefore high logs production. Disk space utilization was over 100%. Now there is a problem with /config/config.xml file, there is no VPN, Suricata, pf configuration available from the UI. Dashboard is corrupted also. However there is /config/backup folder with backed up configuration files. I’ve taken the last known good with proper file size and put it in place. After reboot it works just fine. However I’m not quite sure if there are other issues out there.

To be sure not running out of space, increase disk space and reconfigure Suricata packet logging with proper file sizing to fit available space. If you are on bare metal, then chances are little to zero that you put too small drive in there. In case of virtualization, go to your configuration panel and increase drive space. Then go to serial console or SSH:

gpart show
gpart resize -i 2 da0
gpart show
service growfs onestart
df -h

After this you should have both partition and file system extended.