Just a quick entry to check I can post okay from my tablet. Maybe more beneficial. From my phone so I can upload photos. Nice and easy to do from the official WordPress app, just needed to enter the url of my self-hosted domain and user\password combo
Things to do in lockdown – rebuild world!
Well, FreeBSD world. time had come to update to 12.1 release and thankfully its been much easier than the jump from 11.x to 12.0 Merge did not throw up any issues and 12.1 base built itself overnight ready for installing yesterday morning.
Only pain has been trying to stop python2 getting installed with re-installing all the ports. I think I am just going to have to accept until everything is rebuilt and then remove it. Default versions have been defined in make.conf but seems some ports ignore.
Biggest challenge I was running the Kmod-legacy-drm drivers in the belief these were correct. Several reboots and reinstalls and tinkering did not resolve the unreadable display at boot time meant I had to SSH in from elsewhere to work on it. The cure in the end was quite simple, install the current kmod driver port and voila hi-res text and graphics have been restored. Only issue now is that the Mate Desktop menu’s have disappeared to I can’t actually quit the desktop. but least I can work the box directly now.
EDIT: reinstall of Mate notifications and menu ports has restored my menus.
Old School BIOS Update – via CD-ROM
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.
Mad patching day
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.
Echo Studio
Upgraded the family to the Amazon Music HD subscription but then found that most of my devices being 1st generation did not support the new HD format. For Christmas I had already treated myself to an Echo Show 5 to feed the Hifi, with the added bonus that song artist and titles are now displayed so I don’t have to interupt and ask what song Alexa is now playing.
This was fine for the lounge, but my bedroom still was stuck with a 1st generation “pringle tube” speaker at Lo-Fi sound quality. My GF had treated herself to a 3rd generation Echo and the sound was significantly better than I was getting, so looking at the options for upgrade I saw this bag boy ……
A full blown speaker sized Alexa, The downside is I have lost the rotary volume control of the Gen 1, but the sound quality, especially the bass is immeasurably improved. It also has more heft and volume and even better I have managed to spread the payments over 5 months as was mostly an impulse purchase, but cost me less (in the first month) ) then upgrading to a standard Next Gen Alexa. So overall very pleased, only downside is that I hoped to relegate the surplus bedroom Alexa to a Stereo pair in the Kitchen, but seems you can’t have two 1st Gen Echo’s functioning as a Stereo Pair, so looks like my parents could be getting an Alexa sometime soon….
MS Azure and FreeBSD
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.
Power Cut
Managed to fuse the house last night and last time it trashed the database, just checking this is not the case this time
Patching
Probably a record but 3 laptops, 1 desktop, 1 iPhone and 1 iPad all updated to either Windows 10 1909 build or iOS 13.2 today to catch up on all the recent updates and make sure the kids devices are all running fully supported OS’s.
Hopefully all the complaints about sluggish laptops will now be resolved as Windows is now longer trying to download in the background whilst they are playing or working on the same device.
Back online!
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.
Slow News….
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.