Mirror site to farcorfe.org.uk
Oh I do hate /usr/ports/UPDATING when they refer you to an entry 3 years prior on how to update the current version of a major revision bump and then you need to dig out and correct the numbers to make it work. So I am just going to down my editing here so I can find more easily.
If you use portmaster, install new ruby, then rebuild all ports that depend on ruby:
cd /usr/ports/lang/ruby31 and Make install
# portmaster -o lang/ruby31 lang/ruby30
# portmaster -R -r ruby-3.1
Whilst trying to fix the style sheet for another website I came across this CSS analyser that has many useful features. https://www.projectwallace.com
Tried to add a second Echo to the bedroom for stereo sound. Original order the new echo dot as the price and picture with the pre-christmas deals looked very similar. Quickly realised my mistake as already caught out trying to pair a standard Echo and a Dot. No harm done as was able to quickly re-gift to a friend that needed another Dot.
I then had a few delivery nightmares with Amazon in the lead up to Christmas where the delivery drivers app had seemed to have forgotten where I lived and get getting failed delivery notifications as they could not find the address, so held off ordering a replacement until post Christmas.
I finally got around to ordering another Echo 4th gen, but now appears not only must they be the same model but same generation as well to stereo pair. The Lounge Studios work a treat with the subwoofer as the main HiFi solution the flat but once again stuck with just mono in the bedroom as I am not going to spring for nearly £180 to have two 4th Gen devices when the 5th Gen are rumoured not to be too far away.
When not messing around on here I try and find time to update the old gaming squad site. Although no longer active together online we still catch up in real life from time to time. https://www.thehawks.net/
For many months, the nightly security emails have been warning that db5 and gcc9 were out of date and no longer supported. Numerous attempts to remove just threw up package dependencies, so today I set out to tackle them.
gcc9 proved to be the easiest and whatever previous package had been holding it back had clearly gone and a simple sudo pkg delete gcc9 did not throw up any other package dependencies and soon went.
Not so for db5.
Webalizer, apr and apache24 still insisted on db5. All relatively mainstream packages but all still using db5. Several Googles showed others have had similar problems ever since it was first mentioned as deprecated but the amount of error messages had decreased since July,
Adding dbd=18 to make.conf as the default db version seems to have resolved the problem after a Make Deinstall Clean on apr1, apache24 and the webalizer ports. All 3 then re-built nicely and did not call in db5 which previous attempts to remove and rebuild have done.
Hopefully now after fixing PHP 8.1 and now db5 plus gcc9 the server will live on for another year as a test-bed and platform for my ramblings.
Which means fantasy league predictions, over on Superbru
With the current cost of living crisis in the UK, driven by the increase in energy costs I am limiting the amount of hours I leave the server up and online these days. Certainly over the summer when I had little time to dabble with the various services that I run, its make good economic sense to shut the server down if I am not going to be working on its for a few days.
Therefore expect to see erratic uptime for this website/server, unless I take the plunge and migrate all the content to one of the cloud accounts I am already paying for. The downside will be the loss of local services and a properly offline OneDrive copy that I use for backup purposes.
With the pending retirement of PHP 7.3 the last thing on last months list of things to do was to update PHP to a supported version.
re-building from ports is not easy, but is straight forward. First generate a list of all your installed php packages and save safely where you can access it. Then use pkg delete -f to remove each package on your list. Not forgetting mod_php73 and then find the version of php you want to replace with in /usr/ports/lang and then install php80 and php80_extensions.
I had planned to jump straight to PHP 8.1, but the php81-dom extension is no longer available to install. Ditto php81-hash and php81-json. Thankfully I didn’t need -hash nor json and rolling back to PHP8.0 sufficed.
60 minutes later after manually deinstalling and then installing I had a working system. Well, almost, in my haste to reboot the server, I had forgotten to install mod_php80 so on the reboot Apache failed to start as it did not recognise some of the php injects in the httpd.conf. Rem’ing the errant comments out did not work either as when Apache now started, it could not interpret the .php files and dumped them straight to the screen. Then the penny dropped and a quick install of mod_php80 and reboot finally made Apache happy and everything working again.
Why reboot and not just stop/start Apache et al. Well its a small test rig and not running any production grade services so a complete clear out of the memory from any residual horlicks I have made in past configs or port building means I give it the best hope of running smoothly until the next big upgrade.
With all the furore over log4J and JNDI decided it was time to take the plunge and force the update thru. Although I wasn’t running Log4J there are probably a heap of software out there that will need to be bumped to the latest and greatest, so it seemed sensible to opt for Release 14, given its now on the point 4 update so all the major issues should be ironed out.
Server is mid-update as I type and is going smoothly,
Biggest issue was getting all the ports up to date before I started as a couple of Python related ports where being stubborn, looking for a packaging update to >20, but Postmaster could not seem to find the required dependency. Turns out installing or updating py-packaging made the necessary fix and now all the ports are building nicely I can attempt the OS update as everything will need to be rebuilt again from ports.
While logging into the box, it politely reminded me that FreeBSD 12.2 will be going EOS soon and to upgrade within the next 2 months. “No Problem” I thought, as this is mostly a test rig and hobby box I normally go for the most recent. However this box is now rather long in the tooth and only a dual core M86 ThinkStation that was originally built on FreeBSD 10.1 I think and already been thru several updates and upgrades.
The merging process always seems to be a bit of a dark art and requires a google of mastering VI to edit and save the resultant files. I always seem to end up with a couple of orphaned .SO files too, so some libraries don’t work. This then provides me hours of fun working out which package or port didn’t actually build properly in the upgrade process and attempting to rebuild again via ports. More by Trial and Error I get the. necessary files working and limp on for another year.
So, currently trying to decide if to go the latest and greatest v13 or just take the v12.3 release that is still only in RC editions or wait until 12.3 is out proper. Current thinking is 12.3 General Availability release and use the time to re-investigate AWS and Azure FreeBSD offerings and create a fresh image in the cloud on FB13 and move my dabbling to there.