Category: FreeBSD

Posts and sites FreeBSD related

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PHP 85 install

There were a slew of new packages for FreeBSD 15 on Sunday night, which I promptly installed Monday AM, taking the risk of not reading the UPDATING readme before hand.

Big mistake, as its bumped the default PHP version from 8.4 to 8.5. The install/upgrades seemed to go smoothly and a quick check of the all the installed PHP packages indeed showed they have installed smoothly and no remnants of 8.4 remained, or so I thought.

A quick reboot and disaster.. The website could not connect to the Database server. Mmmh, web page helpfully telling me that the php-mysqli extension was missing. Double check confirmed it wasn’t, but I reinstalled it just in case.

What I had missed and not automatically picked up was mod_phpXX had also been bumped, understandably to mod_php85 and it was this was the culprit to the erroneous error message, A quick pkg install of mod_php85 removed the offending 84 version and a apachectl restart was sufficient to fix the issue.

I should. have remembered from all those days rebuilding ports when I managed via Ports, but 6 months in I had got used to pkg to handle all the dependencies.

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Speedtest from the command line

I have been having issues with network speeds around the house, and down to the cabin. Downloads to the EE hub and first hop was generally fine, but at the farthest end where I used to get one 1 Gig, it had dropped to 100Mb.

Reseating the cable from the garage to the cabin did not do the trick, nor swapping out the switch for one I knew worked, didn’t either. Before I started messing around with the outside cable, I needed to prove the network connection to garage was fine.

As the server sits here, the simplest way was to install speedtest ( sudo pkg install ookla-speedtest ) so I could run a full cable test to there. Once installed its literally just >speedtest to kick off the standard Ookla test from the command line, no GUI needed. This proved that the network switch and feed to the garage was sound, meaning I need to dig up the garden to replace the buried network cable with a better grade cable this time.

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FreeBSD 15 r10 is out

I suspect we are now seeing the benefits of Project Glasswing and Anthropic Mythos bug hunting / security vulnerability detection with yet another incremental release to FreeBSD 15. This time 65 packages needed updating to move from r9 to r10, but as I am now using packages versus ports, it was much quicker to patch and reboot to get the latest protections in place.

Not to be left out, Anthropic released a sanitised version of Mythos, named Fable 5, which is meant to be a sandboxed version of Mythos, that won’t allow blackhats to subvert for deploying malware.

Bottle of Mythos Lager
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Where did April go?

I guess Easter and 2 weeks of nice weather meant I didn’t want or need to touch much. The release of Mythos has also meant a slew of new kernel releases for FreeBSD so short of being busy taking care of them, I have not made too many changes.

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Server Rebuild complete

After nearly 2 years in the planning, and endless delays / lack of inertia to break SSL/TLS or the MTA or the myriad of other things that I had spent ages trying to make work, I have finally managed to migrate the majority of the content from the old black box to a newer black box, replete with SSD’s and faster CPU.

There will still probably be a few broken links for the next week or two before I can say its finally complete, but at least I can now turn off one of the boxes and not shuffle between the two.

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rebuild

I messed up with DMA mail agent as automatically installed SSMTP as I have done for each server rebuild and did not trust the SSMTP delete to reset the everything its installation would have changed, so re-installed the base OS again from scratch.

At least using Packages now (also weaning myself of using ports as not using cutting edge versions or complex needs) its very quick to rebuild and once I have SUDO and WEBMIN installed its nice and easy to quickly build.

Samba was a bit of a pain as FreeBSD is lagging so far behind the main branches supported by Samba so even the latest version (4.20) is out of support. Anyway.. its installed and works so that will have to do.

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FreeBSD 15

I have been very slow to migrate content to the new replacement server, to the point I should already look at new low power spec hardware as so much has moved on in recent years. Given I had not yet promoted my replacement server to production ready, I took the plunge and wiped it back to a clean install of FreeBSD now that its been released so that future updates/upgrades are not degraded by trying to use ‘legacy’ versions of OpenSSL or PKG management.

The other key upgrade for me is DMA – the Dragonfly Mail Agent to replace SSMTP, this is more suited to a hobbyist install like myself and allows me to use GMAIL as my mail transport simplifying email setup.

I am also going to trying installing Lumina as the native desktop again as the new hardware has a dedicated Graphics Card and it maybe handy to be able to run some apps from the GUI rather than CLI only