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 While it does not harm the normal ZFS operation, I think it is not a good idea to have some outdated information living on my hard drive.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...

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...

FreeBSD is designed for users who got lots of spare time. Every once a while, it will give you some troubles (or “snacks” in programmer language), which help you to burn some of your spare time. If you cannot handle these troubles, then FreeBSD is not for you. Although FreeBSD is a rock solid operating system, it is not smart enough to tell whether the owners (i.e., you and me) got plenty of spare time or not. Anyway,...

Upgrading FreeBSD is very easy. Thanks for the simple architecture design and the disconnection between the kernel and the applications (ports), the whole process takes around 15 to 45 minutes. The coolest thing is that the system down time is very short. In my case, the down time was only about 3 minutes. This table will help you to estimate the whole process and system down time: Action Down Time? Approximate Duration Download the...

Today, I noticed that the MySQL server on my FreeBSD server is down for unknown reason, and today is Thanksgiving. Initially, I tried to restart the MySQL server using the following command, but it didn’t help to restart the MySQL: sudo /usr/local/etc/rc.d/mysql-server restart and it gives me the following error message: mysql not running? (check /var/db/mysql/icesquare.com.pid). That’s interesting. So I check the pid...

In case you are not aware this bad news. FreeBSD.org was compromised on September 17, 2012. Good news is that the compromise was caused by a human error (a stupid developer leaked a SSH private key somewhere), which has nothing to do with the code quality of the FreeBSD. Bad news is that this may affect you if you use port. The compromise is believed to have occurred due to the leak of an SSH key from a developer who legitimately had...

FreeBSD is designed for users who got lots of spare time. Every once a while, it will give you some troubles (or “snacks” in programmer language), which help you to burn some of your spare time. If you cannot handle those troubles, then FreeBSD is not for you. Although FreeBSD is a rock solid operating system, it is not smart enough to tell whether the owners (i.e., me and you) got plenty of spare time or not. Anyway,...

After upgrading to PHP 5.4.3 (which is the first version of PHP 5.4 available in the FreeBSD port), I found that the pecl-tokyo_tyrant could not be compiled. Here is the error messages: cd /usr/ports/databases/pecl-tokyo_tyrant sudo make ===> pecl-tokyo_tyrant-0.6.0 cannot install: doesn't work with PHP version : 5 (Doesn't support PHP 5). *** Error code 1 Stop in...