Upgrade complete. 13 >> 14.2

I was very wary about the jump to 14 due to the change in Openssl from 1.1 to 3.0 and the pain that might entail. Also the deprecation of portsnap and getting used to Git was just something I did not have time for.

As I have created a new mirror site , see earlier post, I finally decided to bite the bullet over the festive break and did the freebsd-update upgrade option to 14.2, skipping out 14.0 and 14.1 in the process.

I was a little daunted and it failed to automatically upgrade everything to openssl 3.0 and although built the kernel and rebooted nicely, user land was still doggedly sticking to 1.1. I tried tinkering with make.conf in /etc with various default entries for openssl , but in the end removing the ssl version and just ssl=openssl and then making the usr/ports/openssl allowed 3.0 to install side by side with 1.1 thereby not breaking SSH or anything else until I was able to rebuild all of user land port by port. I was then able to complete freebsd-update install and now have another stable freebsd server for testing and training purposes.

Now I only need to fire this box up when I need Samba to move files around the network or download stuff off YouTube or run a Clamav as a 2nd pass for AV scanning and when I have time to dabble some more with FreeBSD.

New Home / New Start

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.

A mirror site is now up at https://www.hollybob.co.uk/

Disk space solved – ZFS snapshots – DRAFT

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.

Rebuilding server

updates are quite slow as found some new hardware to migrate the existing server onto, but work has been quite busy so finding the time to set aside an evening or two to migrate all the config over and rebuild is a challenge.

Python updated to 3.11

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.

Rust 1.78 will not build

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.

Disk space usage troubles

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

FreeBSD – Updating Ruby

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

OpenSSL Hell

So FreeBSD decided to deprecate OpenSSL 1.1 and amend the base version in ports to OpenSSL 3.0 Its quite a major jump and although MySQL Server 8 is supposed to support various rebuilds from ports kept throwing up unsupported SSL versions when trying to update the various ports that rely on OpenSSL to get a fully working system.

Suffice to say after rolling back to 1.11 I have managed to get everything functioning again, but when it comes to FreeBSD 14 its probably time to do a fresh install with v3.0 as the default and install everything afresh than try and upgrade in place on what is an essential component for a networked device.