Monday, April 10, 2017


Test memcached Using UNIX File Sockets

We love monitoring things, and we also love memcached! Monitoring or testing a memcached instance that is using TCP is fairly straight forward, but we recently ran into a situation where a client was using UNIX file sockets and had to take a step back. You can’t just telnet to a socket file. … or… Read more »

Thursday, February 16, 2017


MySQL Ignoring my.cnf Values / Settings

This is a short one but hopefully it helps avoid some head-into-wall action: You’re setting values in your my.cnf file, wherever that may be, but MySQL doesn’t seem to be picking them up? The most common cause we run across is that there are OTHER my.cnf files on your server, and MySQL only reads the… Read more »

Monday, December 19, 2016


SOLVED: Virtualenv RuntimeError: Package ‘sqlite’ must not be downloaded from pypi

While working with Python Virtualenvs / Virtual Environments we ran into a package that simply refused to install into it: sqlite: (venv) [siteowner@server /share/sites/www.sitename.com]$ pip install sqlite Collecting sqlite Using cached sqlite-99.0.tar.gz Complete output from command python setup.py egg_info: Traceback (most recent call last): File “”, line 1, in File “/tmp/pip-build-USy81K/sqlite/setup.py”, line 2, in raise… Read more »

Thursday, October 27, 2016


HOW TO: Windows 10 Under Bhyve /w FreeBSD 11

With FreeBSD 11 comes a new version of Bhyve with a feature that makes installing Windows 10 a snap: a VNC accessible framebuffer driver! This lets any GUI OS, such as Windows, boot into graphics mode on the console. Previously getting Windows working was possible but required a lot of effort to create a custom… Read more »

Friday, August 19, 2016


SOLVED: FreeBSD + pip + virtualenv = file not found

We love python virtual environments, but under FreeBSD we occasionally see issues where pip is not correctly using the /usr/local/include and /usr/local/lib paths to compile installable modules. The Problem This can produce errors such as the below, which we saw when doing a ‘pip install pycrypto’ operation: src/_fastmath.c:36:11: fatal error: ‘gmp.h’ file not found Even… Read more »

Friday, July 22, 2016


NginX “service nginx upgrade” / kill SIGUSR2 results in shutdown() failed (54: Connection reset by peer)

Huge thanks to Ganbold Tsagaankhuu who finally got to the bottom of this issue. NginX is a great web server, and is built from the ground up for high volume, zero down time environments. One of the most basic features of such a service is the ability to restart completely (not just child processes, which… Read more »

Friday, April 8, 2016


FreeBSD Hangs on “Trying to mount root from zfs:zroot”

There are many reasons this can happen, but this one I believe is unique in terms of searching the internet for the error. We’d see a newly imaged (or restored from backup) ZFS-based server boot fine then hang here: Trying to mount root from zfs:zroot After banging my head into it for some time thinking… Read more »

Sunday, January 10, 2016


Poudriere “Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/pkg’ not found”

This was quite the random error I ran across this week and could not find anything similar or a solution. After years of faithfully building our FreeBSD pkg repository poudriere started reporting these weird errors and refused to build anything: ====>> Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/apxs’ not found. ====>> Error: Invalid port origin ‘/usr/local/sbin/pkg’ not… Read more »

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