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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/

One of the most useful features I use the Freebsd box for is to cache a copy of my MS OneDrive that is only periodically synced, so that is MS has a problem I have a full offline copy or if I manage delete a file from the cloud that I really didn’t want to do and hopefully I still have a copy in the unsynced cache.

All was fine until the OneDrive port for FreeBSD insisted on reinstalling the long deprecated Python27 libraries. No matter how much cleaning and checking dependencies prevented Python27 being rebuilt from ports each time.

I managed to spend some time today looking at each of the OneDrive dependencies and found that LLVM70 and LLVM10 are both listed. Oddly LLVM10 supersedes LLVM70 and calls in the more modern Python37. So by building LLVM10 first so the dependency is met, when I rebuild OneDrive I no longer get the obsolete version installed.

The Metaport of LLVM is not clear which version is built, I already have LLVM90 installed but does not seem to satisfy the OneDrive dependencies. Not sure if this is OneDrive maintenance issue, or a LLVM issue. but thankfully now resolved and the box can get back to doing what it should. –

Update – LLVM was not the issue, but LDC which calls in LLVM. When the next port update to OneDrive came out, LDC rebuilt LLVM70. So now looking at LDC as the culprit.

The OneDrive CLI client is not unique to BSD and the default GitHub page for Linux version can be found here.