Category: FreeBSD

After 7 years faithful service, its about time to retire the 2nd incarnation of my home based server. This one has gone thru about 7 different FreeBSD builds and despite various fun and games regarding loss of disk space, which turned out to be the large ZFS snapshots taken every time FreeBSD had a major upgrade its performed tirelessly.

I will keep the M58 on as backup, but no longer needed to keep my feet warm running under my desk 24/7 and reduce my household electric bill a little.

Its also time to start house-hunting again after 3 happy years in the flat, but its time to move on, so also not needing to find a cubby hole in a new house with Cat6 , power and ventilation is also one less worry. Its probably means I won’t have as much to post about as keeping the server regularly patched and upgrade has been how I have self taught myself most of my Unix/Linux experience, but does mean I don’t need to worry if an upgrade fails and work late into the night to rebuild it any more.

Might have found my Rust 1.78/1.79 is not building, as checking the dependencies, it wants Python 3.11, but my make.conf file holds python at 3.9. Not sure why Postmaster was not complaining at build time with a more helpful error message, but this seems a good place to start, so now off to rebuild Python.

20240529:

  AFFECTS: users of python

  AUTHOR: rm@FreeBSD.org

  The default version of python3 and python was switched to 3.11.

  For ports users wanting to keep version 3.9 as default,

  add DEFAULT_VERSIONS+= python=3.9 python3=3.9 to make.conf

  Following procedures may ease the upgrade:

  For users of pre-build packages:

  # sh

  # for i in $(pkg query -g %n ‘py39-*’); do pkg set -yn ${i}:py311-${i#py39-}; done

  # pkg upgrade

  For portmaster users:

  # sh

  # portmaster -o lang/python311 python39

  # REINSTALL=”$(pkg info -oq ‘*py39*’)”

  # pkg delete -f “*py39*”

  # portmaster $REINSTALL

  # REBUILD=$(pkg query -g “%n:%dn” ‘*’ | grep py3 | grep -v py311 | cut -d : -f 1 | sort -u)

  # portmaster $REBUILD

  # REBUILD2=$(pkg list | grep python-39 | xargs pkg which | awk ‘{print $6}’ | sort -u)

  # portmaster $REBUILD2

  Final steps (for pre-built packages & portmaster):

  If no longer required, Python 3.9 can be removed via

  “pkg remove python39” and the directory /usr/local/lib/python3.9 can

  then be deleted afterwards, if not empty.

Free disk space continues to be an issue, I’ve deleted 50Gb of backups but df -h has yet to recognise the new free space. This would not be an issue apart from Rust and Cargo-c appear to want to use up all available free disk space.

I also noted a discrepancy between the Pkg Info command to re-port out of date packages/ports and those that postmaster -da then tried to build as being out of date.

If I manage to resolve these issues I will update this post.

Whilst trying to update some common ports I keep running out of disk space, causing the Database to halt and then the website to fail. Struggling to find out which package is consuming excessive disk space and fear I need to drop down to single user mode to run fsck (but meaning I need to find a VGA cable and suitable monitor to hook up to ) so seeing which packages consume the most and may be able to go, so run.

pkg info -sa | sort -hk2

The default version of Ruby has been bumped to 3.2, which is fine, but /UPDATING no longer includes the steps needed to bump your installed version.

No problem, just scroll down to see what the instructions were for the last revision bump. And then you hit a problem. All the Ruby port bumps refer you to the 2019 entry, which is fab , stepping thru instructions of how to move from 2.4 to 2.5. , however, UPDATING no longer goes all the way back to 2019. It’s been trimmed. A bit of googling and a found the unedited version of UPGRADING which helpfully had the instructions, which for ease I have pasted below and for even easier usage, have amended the instructions for moving between 3.1 and 3.2

20190420:
  AFFECTS: users of lang/ruby24
  AUTHOR: mfechner@FreeBSD.org

The default ruby version has been updated from 2.4 to 2.5.

If you compile your own ports you may keep 2.4 as the default version by adding the following lines to your /etc/make.conf file:

#
  # Keep ruby 2.4 as default version
  #
  DEFAULT_VERSIONS+=ruby=2.4

If you wish to update to the new default version, you need to first stop any software that uses ruby. Then, you will need to follow these steps, depending upon how you manage your system.

If you use pkgng, simply upgrade:
  # pkg upgrade

If you use portmaster, install new ruby, then rebuild all ports that depend on ruby:
  # portmaster -o lang/ruby25 lang/ruby24
  # portmaster -R -r ruby-2.5

If you use portupgrade, install new ruby, then rebuild all ports that depend on ruby:

# pkg delete -f ruby portupgrade
  # make -C /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade install clean
  # pkg set -o lang/ruby24:lang/ruby25
  # portupgrade -x ruby-2.5.\* -fr lang/ruby25

and upgraded version is

20240306:
  AFFECTS: users of lang/ruby31
  AUTHOR: me!

The default ruby version has been updated from 3.1 to 3.2.

If you compile your own ports you may keep 3.1 as the default version by  adding the following lines to your /etc/make.conf file:

  DEFAULT_VERSIONS+=ruby=3.1

If you wish to update to the new default version, you need to first stop any software that uses ruby. Then, you will need to follow these steps, depending upon how you manage your system.

If you use pkgng, simply upgrade:
  # pkg upgrade

If you use portmaster, install new ruby, then rebuild all ports that depend on ruby:
  # portmaster -o lang/ruby32 lang/ruby31
  # portmaster -R -r ruby-3.2

If you use portupgrade, install new ruby, then rebuild all ports that depend on ruby:

# pkg delete -f ruby portupgrade
  # make -C /usr/ports/ports-mgmt/portupgrade install clean
  # pkg set -o lang/ruby31:lang/ruby32
  # portupgrade -x ruby-3.2.\* -fr lang/ruby32

The default version of Perl has been bumped to 5.36, see my page Updating Perl on FreeBSD on how to update via Postmaster or Portupgrade