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General notes and updates
Stumbled on this and maybe useful in the run up to Christmas to make sure you have the rights leads or plugs in order to use what ever presents Santa leaves under the tree. Almost all new phones are USB-C these days, and smaller devices and gadgets , but there will be some stuff lingering on with Micro-USB until they refresh the designs.
The one exception will be slightly older Apple phones (iPhone 14 or below) that use the Lighting Port (not shown)
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.
where did October go? Installing Apple updates across phone, iPad, Watch, TV and laptop probably accounts for half of it!
The update to PERL also managed to break SSL, with no clear culprit of what had failed. rebuilding all the of PERL dependencies did little to fix it. and oddly Apache still tried to serve up the webpages but in plain text on the internal network.
Going thru the Freebsd-update fetch and install route and rebuilding OpenSSL once the patch update had been applied allow Apache to once again happily serve up the site pages.
iOS 17 is not far away from being launched but I have been running the Beta’s on phone, iPad, Watch and AppleTV quite happily for a month now. After upgrading the AppleTV the big screen FaceTime is a bonus but watching the Apple Launch event now sure I need the finger double tap for the watch or the USB-C connections for iPhone so will wait to see how the prices pan out or if a battery replacement on each will buy another year of service and see what next September brings.
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
Whilst trying to fix the style sheet for another website I came across this CSS analyser that has many useful features. https://www.projectwallace.com
As its gone incredibly chilly in the UK at present, its a question of leaving the server on to help heat up the room vs pay the increasing energy bill.
For many months, the nightly security emails have been warning that db5 and gcc9 were out of date and no longer supported. Numerous attempts to remove just threw up package dependencies, so today I set out to tackle them.
gcc9 proved to be the easiest and whatever previous package had been holding it back had clearly gone and a simple sudo pkg delete gcc9 did not throw up any other package dependencies and soon went.
Not so for db5.
Webalizer, apr and apache24 still insisted on db5. All relatively mainstream packages but all still using db5. Several Googles showed others have had similar problems ever since it was first mentioned as deprecated but the amount of error messages had decreased since July,
Adding dbd=18 to make.conf as the default db version seems to have resolved the problem after a Make Deinstall Clean on apr1, apache24 and the webalizer ports. All 3 then re-built nicely and did not call in db5 which previous attempts to remove and rebuild have done.
Hopefully now after fixing PHP 8.1 and now db5 plus gcc9 the server will live on for another year as a test-bed and platform for my ramblings.