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 /usr/ports/databases/pecl-tokyo_tyrant/work/tokyo_tyrant-0.6.0/tokyo_tyrant.c:1827: error: expected '=', ',', ';', 'asm' or '__attribute__' before...

When PHP 5.4 was available few months ago, I was hesitated to upgrade my FreeBSD box to upgrade to 5.4, because it comes with lots of big changes, including removing LOTS of old stuffs that were available in 5.3 or earlier versions. Today PHP 5.4.3 becomes available in FreeBSD ports. I guess it is stable enough and I should give it a try, and I am glad that I tried it in my test machine first. Warning: Before you upgrade to PHP...

Recently, I found the following error message when updating my FreeBSD system regarding to the OpenLDAP: ===> Installing for openldap-client-2.4.31 ===> Generating temporary packing list ===> Checking if net/openldap24-client already installed ===> Creating users and/or groups. Using existing group `ldap'. Creating user `ldap' with uid `389'. pw: user 'ldap' already exists *** Error code 74 Stop in...

Recently, I built a FreeBSD server with ZFS file system using six 2TB harddisks. If you like to learn what I have done or understand more about ZFS, you can read the story here: ZFS+USB: Building a Super Large Server Using USB Memory, CF Card and SD Card.. Many people found a problem on their ZFS system. The speed is slow! It is slow to read or write files to the system. In this article, I am going to show you some tips on improving the...

After I updated my Samba to 3.5.14 on my FreeBSD box today, it stopped working. I couldn’t connect to the Samba server from my Windows clients. Initially, I thought it was the memory cache issues, and I thought the problem would be solved by rebooting both machines. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. Therefore, I accessed to the server and check the cause of the problem. First, I found that Samba was not evening running. ps...

Recently I got a new hard drive (3TB) for my Linux box at work. I didn’t realize that it is problematic / nightmare to do such a simple work. First, if you try to use fdisk to add the drive, it won’t work. Or I should say… it works, but it only give you a 2TB usable space. This is a limitation of fdisk, because it can handle up to 2^32 -1 sectors (or 2TB). That’s why fdisk is not a solution here. It seems that the...

Many people are confused between the compression and deduplication because they are so similar. Both of them are designed to reduce the size of the data being stored in the storage. Let me explain the difference between them in simple English. 1. This is how your data looks like originally (Assuming only one unique file): 2. This is how your data look like after being stored in a ZFS pool with compression enabled. 3. This is how your...

After I updated the Apache to 2.2.22 for my FreeBSD box today, I got a problem: #apachectl stop #apachectl start [warn] (2)No such file or directory: Failed to enable the 'dataready' Accept Filter If you search for Failed to enable the ‘dataready’ Accept Filter on Google, you probably will find a lot of posts about this solution, like the following: #kldload accf_http Or include the following in the boot loader...

Today, I found that one of my PHP scripts stop working. After some investigations, I found that it was the function, imagecreatefrompng, which caused the problem. Interestingly, other similar functions such as imagecreatefromgif and imagecreatefromjpeg were completely working fine. The program stopped working when calling imagecreatefrompng only. Initially, I thought the problem was coming from the PHP side. Therefore, I tried to get...

Upgrading FreeBSD is very easy. Thanks for the simple architecture and the disconnection between the kernel and the applications (ports), it won’t take too long to upgrade the system (15 to 45 mins). Here is a quick tutorial to show you how to do it. Notice that this tutorial only works for i386 or amd64. For other CPU architectures such as Sparc, you will either reinstall the whole thing or rebuild the whole world (i.e., make...