Category: Housekeeping

my ports \distfiles directory had grown to over 30Gb in the 4 years since I last did a complete clean fresh build and as its something of a test rig for trying stuff out, it had grown rather large.

by running the following commands I regained c22Gb of disc space, ready for which ever pet project I choose to tinker with next.

sudo portmaster --check-depends 
sudo portmaster --check-port-dbdir 
sudo portmaster -s 
sudo portmaster -y --clean-distfiles

might not be full lockdown, but the vaccines are here so time to rebuild both the virtual and IRL world.. Updated FreeBSD to 12.2 which had probably been one of the simplest OS updates. I usually get caught out with merging the updated config files but guess the second point update to 12.x probably was not a major change to get wrong. Also made easier by stripping off MATE and most of the desktop apps that I occassionally dabbled with as its back to running as as Headless Server with all access over SSH or Web Interface.

After finally getting RHASH to build, a few easy days and then Nettle would not build. I tried everything, MAKE CLEAN, DEINSTALL, rebuilding build dependencies, nothing worked. Re-installing the old package again kept everything work.

In deperation, I saw the the GHOST-BSD laptop I am currently testing had a built package for nettle-3.6 so in desparation and part trial, I copied the nettle package from the laptop to the server and then issued SUDO PKG ADD path/to/nettle.3.5.xxx and hey presto, it installed and after several reboots and rebuilds of dependent packages it works. Its probably not the safest or more secure, but allowed all the packages that then depend on GNUTLS to build to the latest ports.

Have spent two weeks trying to update RHASH from 1.3.5 to 1.3.9 via ports, but kept giving build errors on openssl.mod which no one else was reporting. Tried to deinstall clean and rebuild and still no go.

Checked Freshports for updates and it is not updated very often but did notice that gettext-tools and gettext-runtime where listed as dependencies too. So quick make deinstall clean and re-install I thought might help. But part way thru reinstalling, Sudo no longer worked on getting gettext-runtime to function. Seems deinstalling gettext-tools broke Sudo. So quick SU to rebuild gettext-tools and sign out and back in again might fix it.

but oh no, still the same build error. However asking portmaster to build atril, it then went away happily and updated RHASH thereby allowing CMAKE to update and now the remaining ports seems to be updating happily enough.

Well, FreeBSD world. time had come to update to 12.1 release and thankfully its been much easier than the jump from 11.x to 12.0 Merge did not throw up any issues and 12.1 base built itself overnight ready for installing yesterday morning.

Only pain has been trying to stop python2 getting installed with re-installing all the ports. I think I am just going to have to accept until everything is rebuilt and then remove it. Default versions have been defined in make.conf but seems some ports ignore.

Biggest challenge I was running the Kmod-legacy-drm drivers in the belief these were correct. Several reboots and reinstalls and tinkering did not resolve the unreadable display at boot time meant I had to SSH in from elsewhere to work on it. The cure in the end was quite simple, install the current kmod driver port and voila hi-res text and graphics have been restored. Only issue now is that the Mate Desktop menu’s have disappeared to I can’t actually quit the desktop. but least I can work the box directly now.

EDIT: reinstall of Mate notifications and menu ports has restored my menus.

Planning for the next major FreeBSD update, I decided I should update the old BIOS first, Lenovo are very good at releasing updates to BIOS/UEFI long after the product has ceased being available.

Suffice to say a quick check of https://pcsupport.leveno.com/gb/en and pumping in the Model No (or device serial no) detailed a list of updates for my hardware a good 5 years newer than the original BIOS that shipped with this box.

However is its non-Windows all the usual update tools where irrelevant. Litterally had to dust down my DVD/CD recordable drive and download the BIOS ISO and burn to CD. A quick dabble to change the boot order and re-enable the original DVD drive and I was finally able to flash the BIOS. All very slow compared to in-windows updates on my other devices.

No major great improvements, but better support for any more modern hardware I might chuck inside like SSD’s in the future.

Decided to upgrade the base MySQL backend today, but got into a world of pain, by following the last advice in /usr/ports/UPDATING.

That only updated the packages and lead to about 280 other ports and packages being over-written. Not good. Ended up having to Make Deinstall from the old Mysqlxx-Server and Mysqlxx-client ports and manually installing again.

But down now and hopefully some other lost dependencies fixed.

Home Server has been offline for a bit as I grappled with MS Azure and setting up a FreeBSD VM. The initial setup went fine, and the first month was free, but trying to establish the monthly running costs for a comparable VM to the current setup proved elusive so I never actually got a “mirror” of this site up and running in the MS Cloud.

So I waited it out and eventually the real prices became visible, £79 per month so the equivalent VM for what I only paid £140 a one-off for the physical box sat here at home. Yes, it burns electricity and hums away in the corner and needs me to feed VirginMedia a shedload of money per month, to keep the “VIP” bandwidth and upload speed but I would be doing that anyway for the rest of the family, MS Azure and FreeBSD does not currently work for me.