Category: Housekeeping

Planning for the next major FreeBSD update, I decided I should update the old BIOS first, Lenovo are very good at releasing updates to BIOS/UEFI long after the product has ceased being available.

Suffice to say a quick check of https://pcsupport.leveno.com/gb/en and pumping in the Model No (or device serial no) detailed a list of updates for my hardware a good 5 years newer than the original BIOS that shipped with this box.

However is its non-Windows all the usual update tools where irrelevant. Litterally had to dust down my DVD/CD recordable drive and download the BIOS ISO and burn to CD. A quick dabble to change the boot order and re-enable the original DVD drive and I was finally able to flash the BIOS. All very slow compared to in-windows updates on my other devices.

No major great improvements, but better support for any more modern hardware I might chuck inside like SSD’s in the future.

Decided to upgrade the base MySQL backend today, but got into a world of pain, by following the last advice in /usr/ports/UPDATING.

That only updated the packages and lead to about 280 other ports and packages being over-written. Not good. Ended up having to Make Deinstall from the old Mysqlxx-Server and Mysqlxx-client ports and manually installing again.

But down now and hopefully some other lost dependencies fixed.

Home Server has been offline for a bit as I grappled with MS Azure and setting up a FreeBSD VM. The initial setup went fine, and the first month was free, but trying to establish the monthly running costs for a comparable VM to the current setup proved elusive so I never actually got a “mirror” of this site up and running in the MS Cloud.

So I waited it out and eventually the real prices became visible, £79 per month so the equivalent VM for what I only paid £140 a one-off for the physical box sat here at home. Yes, it burns electricity and hums away in the corner and needs me to feed VirginMedia a shedload of money per month, to keep the “VIP” bandwidth and upload speed but I would be doing that anyway for the rest of the family, MS Azure and FreeBSD does not currently work for me.

A MySQL server update at the start of the year did not go as planned and corrupted the tablespace. Its taken me a while to restore the system and coupled with a busy summer meant I have only just found the time to restore to an operational state.

Been rather slow updating the site as managed to break the server massively whilst updating to FreeBSD 12. All the SSL libraries got mangled so have had to rebuild everything from ports and correct all the conflicts as I go.

And just when I think its all sorted and builds without errors, when I then go to run the application I then get warnings that various functions are not supported so its back to recompliling. But most things appear to be working now like Apache, Samba, WordPress etc.

No sooner do FreeBSD jump from PHP 5.6 to 7.1, the default version jumps to 7.2 in a matter of weeks.  Cue rebuild of all the Apache and PHP ports again.   least everything is being patched regularly.

 

 

Although I have had webmin on the server for ages, and keep looking at Fing,  I didn’t have any real time monitoring of the network.   This has now been addressed thu the installation of nagios

Took a bit of figuring which version of nagios to install for FreeBSD.   Nagios 4 aka Core is available in the ports so was quite an install, once I realised I was missing mod_cgi from my Apache configuration.  The CGI files where coming down as downloads and not running as scripts.  That and checking Nagios had access to the folders.

Still struggling with plug-ins and add-ons.  The default add-ins  have been installed from the ports but there are lots more on the Nagios website, but not sure how to install now.  So plenty of spare weekends and evenings tinkering with now the core service is up and running.

 

Quick flurry of updates as Samba 4.6 finally went out of support earlier this month so no more patches, so quick deinstall of Samba46 and then install of Samba48 to get Samba back into support.

Update to PHP 7.1 was a bit more involved.  Needed to update make.conf to amend the default_versions from 5.6 to 7.1 and then locate the port directories for mod_php56 and de-install.   Quick build of mod_php71 to update that and then pkg delete php56 to remove all the extensions.

I have Kanboard and phpsysinfo installed, so a quick trip to their port directories to re-installed pulled in most of the PHP extensions needed, but oddly not php71-extensions, so on Apachectl Restart WordPress spewed up some Server 500 Errors.  A quick check of the previous php extensions now installed versus the previous 56 variants thru up a few ports that had not been pulled back in.   A quick re-build of those ports and another apachectl restart and all is well and Apache is now running PHP 7.1 happily.

 

My daily and weekly status updates from Root stopped appearing in my main inbox a while back, (probably when I switched from Sendmail to SSMTP.  )  but they did appear in my secondary email account as this was the bounce-back address for email failures, as failure reports.

Issue seemed to be that the Root mail box was not reachable anymore.   Attempts to amend an alias to have them delivered to a live account failed as most of the method listed for amending Root’s alias are for Sendmail.

A bit of googling found this post  http://possiblelossofprecision.net/?p=591 and identified the correct file to edit as /ETC/MAIL.RC and add

set append dot save ask crt
ignore Received Message-Id Resent-Message-Id Status Mail-From Return-Path Via
alias root yournewrootmailboxhere@nowhere.com

to finally restore my housekeeping updates from the system