Category: Tech News

Finally resolved the diminishing lack of free disk space for future FreeBSD updates. It seems that since version xx.x each upgrade as made a ZFS snapshot taking 1-3Gb each for each successive version. As the hardware has been running since 2017 that’s an awful lot of major and point revision snapshots.

DU and DF hid those successive snapshots and I was blaming my ever expanding OneDrive offline sync for taking excessive amounts of disk space even though I was convinced I had move the sync folder to the slave disk some time ago.

As I have never needed to roll back a ZFS snapshot I had never needed to explore what amount of space they took, or even how to display their usage, even less so how to delete them. Necessity being the mother of all invention, or least the need for a proper Google session I finally found the commands and confidence to delete 12 previous incarnations of FreeBSD and give me back the free disk I need to apply the next edition of FreeBSD.

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

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.

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

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.

As the server is hosted from home, sometime the droning of the Hard Drive and fans annoys me and as I only host this for fun and self learning it occasionally gets turned of. This meant it missed the Cron Jobs that that should have replaced the cert long before renewal date.

Added to that, when I moved I locked down the router config and only allowed port 443 thru to the webserver to only permit TLS/SSL traffic and not plain HTTP. In the main this has worked well, but also meant the certbot script failed to renew the cert on demand as it could not write to the .wellknown folder on port 80.

So, now port forwarded port 80 to the server and the certificate has updated as required.