Category: Tech News

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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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IOS 27 / WatchOS 27 pre-release – Walkie Talkie

Now that the public Beta of iOS27 has been out a while, I have pushed the 27 updates to my phone, watch and TV. So far the only noticeable update has been the removal of the WalkieTalkie App from the Watch. Not a massive loss, but was useful when running to call out live updates to fellow runners in the group if spread over a course, or when shopping with the family to coordinate when separated.

I have not yet noticed any improvements to Siri, but unclear if the backend has been switched over to Google yet and I don’t use it that often anyway.

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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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Lights, Camera, Action

Have been busy with the house and adding additional garden/external lighting and then automating with Tapo S210 light switches so they can all be turned on remotely, or in case of the Garage light, as soon as the door opens.

It was mostly easy to swap over the original light switches, but the depth of the control unit on the switch, as it needs to accommodate two AA batteries meant with the curl of electrical cables coming into the pattress box it was all a bit tight. A quick check of Amazon and some 10mm spacers allowed the cables and cover to be fitted snuggly and now they are set up for both Tapo, Alexa and Apple HomeKit to control. The S210 need a Tapo hub, which is also the Matter bridge into HomeKit to function but now means the entire family can control them too.

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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

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Busy with updates – FreeBSD 14.3

Finally found some time and upgraded both servers to 14.3 and trying to establish a stable baseline of installed apps like Apache, MySql, PHP, Perl, and Samba so I can easily port the remaining services over to the “new” server and retire the older one before it expires.

Setting up a new Wifi SSID for the older devices meant the Washing Machine, and cycle computer now connect easily and the Cameras appear to be more stable.

iOS 26 dropped last month but with no real massive technical changes, but now waiting for a new iPhone 17 to see Apple Intelligence live and in action as current iPad and iPhone are too old to benefit.

Its been quite a successful month with just the iKettle left to fix, but this seems to be an issue with the App or backend server as I can see its connected to the Wifi fine and can ping it fine, and I don’t seem to be the only one with issues with the smarter.io kettle range.

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Perl updated to 5.40

so that means another forced updated of everything built with PERL. Not sure why /usr/ports/UPDATING keeps pointing us back to 2023 when they could just post the postmaster commands to update from the last default version to new default version… heyho.

portmaster -o lang/perl5.40 lang/perl5.36

portmaster -f `pkg shlib -qR libperl.so.5.36`

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Cyber Security Certifications

Often get asked which Cyber Security courses are worth doing. Well there is an absolute plethora of different courses available to suit relevant backgrounds. A colleague found this and it look pretty useful

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Alexa+ – Alexa on Steriods with AI

Echo Dot

Amazon are adding new powers existing Alexas over the coming weeks and months.
More details here

Question is how much privacy will be sacrificed for the enhanced functionality. Scant detail on the original product launch blog.