Author: Steve Wilson

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OpenSSL Hell

So FreeBSD decided to deprecate OpenSSL 1.1 and amend the base version in ports to OpenSSL 3.0 Its quite a major jump and although MySQL Server 8 is supposed to support various rebuilds from ports kept throwing up unsupported SSL versions when trying to update the various ports that rely on OpenSSL to get a fully working system.

Suffice to say after rolling back to 1.11 I have managed to get everything functioning again, but when it comes to FreeBSD 14 its probably time to do a fresh install with v3.0 as the default and install everything afresh than try and upgrade in place on what is an essential component for a networked device.

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October

where did October go? Installing Apple updates across phone, iPad, Watch, TV and laptop probably accounts for half of it!

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Apple and FreeBSD update

The update to PERL also managed to break SSL, with no clear culprit of what had failed. rebuilding all the of PERL dependencies did little to fix it. and oddly Apache still tried to serve up the webpages but in plain text on the internal network.

Going thru the Freebsd-update fetch and install route and rebuilding OpenSSL once the patch update had been applied allow Apache to once again happily serve up the site pages.

iOS 17 is not far away from being launched but I have been running the Beta’s on phone, iPad, Watch and AppleTV quite happily for a month now. After upgrading the AppleTV the big screen FaceTime is a bonus but watching the Apple Launch event now sure I need the finger double tap for the watch or the USB-C connections for iPhone so will wait to see how the prices pan out or if a battery replacement on each will buy another year of service and see what next September brings.

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Updating Perl to 5.34

The UPDATING readme for successfully updating all the Perl modules when the default version takes a revision bump is helpful, but could be a damm site more helpful if they just re-posted the original advice, its not as its its pages and pages.

Anyway here is my link to the amended commands to effect the upgrade.

Link to Page

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Apple Beta Updates

Back from holiday so have now installed the new iPhone, Watch and AppleTV beta updates, and may have found a killer feature in the WatchOS update which allows the Watch to connect to my bike Bluetooth Cadence sensor, so effectively making the cycle computer redundant as the Apple Health cycle mode will replicate all the functions the cycle computer will do. Interesting to see how this might impact battery life though on the watch given it will be much more active during rides.

Seems to be lots of little changes to iPhone in terms of widgets and messaging integration, but probably more updates for the Instagram generation rather than myself. Early days yet so will probably find more useful features as I delve and others update so the SharePlay functions come into their own.

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New Offerings from Apple – Beta launches

Been looking at the new beta previews from Apple of the forthcoming iOS/TvOS/WatchOS coming out later this year.

WatchOS does not appear to have a major new killer functions, least not for me. although current Watch is 3 years old, so will probably update anyway, but the new body temperature sensor is less of a pull for me, but if it can take accurate body temperature rather than just variations in temperature I might be sold.

Of a bigger pull is the addition of FaceTime to AppleTV 4K. Using an iPhone/iPad as the local camera feed putting friends and family on the big screen is a welcome addition. Yet to see the revised controls, but have been getting annoyed with the current controls and the control panel covering the subtitles or screen text I purposely paused it to read is hopefully corrected. watch this space.

Yet to look at the iPhone iOS update changes, but will take a deeper look at when I can.

EDIT – pants – FaceTime is not available on 1st 4K Gen AppleTV boxes and not sure there is an enough change in the tech to warrant splashing out on a new box. just for FaceTime. Also requires Phone to be on iOS17 so really not worth the change today.

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Who salutes who?

Always confuses me the different ranks and titles that the UK Military use, so Defence Focus created this handy guide.

Graphic from Defence Focus listing the UK military grades in order of rank, by service.
Who salutes who
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GoAccess parsing issues resolved

Since Webalizer fell into disrepair some years ago, I dabbled with GoAccess for website stats and sort of got it working. Several OS or Apache updates later it decided to stop working and I never found the time to fix.

Well, todays persistent rain and nothing better to do, I resolved to fix why GoAccess refused to parse my Apache logs.

The initial fault seemed to stem from GoAccess not being able to decide if I had CLF ( Common Log Format) or Combined Log Format. Apache was insistent that I had set Combined Log Format looking at httpd.conf, but GoAccess complained on start-up that this was not the case.

As this is a hobby server and I had not needed to rotate the logs for several years I can only guess the httpd-access.log had been corrupted or mixed with CLF at some point, so a forced log rotation stopped the error messages on startup and allowed the basic details of the log to be parsed.

However the referrer and user agent still was not parsed. It seems there is a error in the sample goaccess.conf file and the %R and %u fields need double quotes to be parsed fully. A post way back from 2014 seemed to flag this but the MAN page still does not pick this up, maybe its a FreeBSD specific issues

Anyhoo, fixing this is the Combined Log file format parse string now has the file being parsed happily. The OS and Browser detections still seem a bit pants, Safari and Apple iOS and MacOS seemed to be lumped under Linux, but job for another day.

The analytics can be found here

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Solved – MYSQL refusing to start

I had upgraded my version of Mysql Server via the ports a few weeks back and usually ports is very good at addressing any compatibility issues bumping up the versions. A quick read of UPDATING had not flagged any real concerns, but on the reboot Mysql was steadfastly refusing to start. No obvious error messages where thrown and it just silently refused to budge.

Googling presented several solutions, but none palpable (wipe config and dbs and start again). However one suggestion was to check the {hostname}.err file contained within /var/db/mysql and lo and behold a quick TAIL {hostname}.err displayed the error that I have been missing. Namely that query_cache_type=0 and query_cache_size=0 had been deprecated starting with v8 and needed to be deleted from my.cnf file.

Fixing the my.cnf file and a quick service mysql-server start restored my Databases and we are back up and running.