My FreeBSD got an unknown fever today. When I updated my ports using portsnap, it gave the following error message: #sudo portsnap fetch Looking up portsnap.FreeBSD.org mirrors... 6 mirrors found. Fetching snapshot tag from your-org.portsnap.freebsd.org... done. Fetching snapshot metadata... done. Updating from Thu May 23 09:08:53 CDT 2013 to Thu May 23 09:25:25 CDT 2013. Fetching 0 metadata patches. done. Applying metadata...

I decided to install Java on my FreeBSD box today. It wasn’t a very good experience. Primary the system is not automated. It requires a lot of manual works. Anyway, after waiting for couple hours, I found that the process was stuck on glib. The system could not build the /usr/ports/devel/glib20. Here is the error message: ===> Building for glib-2.34.3 gmake all-recursive gmake[1]: Entering directory...

I have many hard drives circulating among my servers for testing purpose. For example, I took a hard drive from one server and put it into a different server. After doing this for many times, I notice that the ZFS has put many header information / meta data on my hard drive. While it does not harm the normal ZFS operation, I think it is not a good idea to have some outdated information living on my hard drive. Here is an example: #sudo...

I am a heavy user of Adobe Lightroom. Often, I need to access my Lightoom catalog files using multiple computers. Currently, Lightroom only allows users to save the catalog files on a local hard drive, which is very inconvenient. For example, after I do the work using my office computer, I like to continue my work using my home computer. Unfortunately, it is very hard to synchronize my work with the current settings. I just don’t...

One of my PHP web applications stopped working today. After I investigated the issues, I noticed that this is a very famous, yet unsolved error. I have no idea why it happens, but I do have a work around solution for it. Basically, this article applies to you if you match all of the following: You use PHP Your web applications talk to other servers via domain name (e.g., example.com rather than 123.1.1.3) You use XAMPP (instead of...