Every once in awhile, I start receiving the following daily email notification from my web server:

newsyslog: can't notify daemon, pid 569: No such process

If I don't do anything, the very same message will keep on arriving in my mailbox every single day for the rest of my life. The solution is probably pretty trivial, but I cannot figure out what is causing this to occur. I've already wasted way too much time digging around in the innards of my FreeBSD box trying to discover something unusual, but to no avail.

Not that such a trivial warning means the end of the world, but it really bugs me for some reason. I'm impatient and easily aggravated by inconsistencies. Just kill everything by rebooting the system and hoping that it will not come back (but it always does).

sudo shutdown -r now

All of a sudden I started receiving daily crontab email notifications from my web server with the following warning:

expiretable: Error opening "/dev/pf": No such file or directory

I checked my /etc/rc.conf and as expected it contained the following required lines:

$ vi /etc/rc.conf
pf_enable="YES"
pf_rules="/etc/pf.conf"
pflog_enable="YES"

So in theory everything should have started without any problems. Well, maybe not so just in case I fired off the following two commands:

$ kldload pf
$ /etc/rc.d/pf start
$ /etc/rc.d/pf status
No ALTQ support in kernel
ALTQ related functions disabled
Status: Enabled for 0 days 00:10:34           Debug: Urgent
...

Now working. If things go wrong again I'll have to investigate the problems better.

# portupgrade --batch -arR

 

I try to run this at least once a week so that my web server stays up to date.

This weekend they were having this big 25% computer sale at Media Markt, so I went there and decided to splurge on an ASUS X59SL-AP275C for my upcoming birthday.

Although it comes pre-installed with Windows Vista, the first thing I'm going to do is remove it and replace it with the latest version of my favorite operating system.

I'll go for the bleeding edge version FreeBSD 7.1-BETA and recompile the kernel with the new and vastly improved ULE scheduler.

cd /usr/src/sys/i386/conf
cp GENERIC LAPTOP
vi LAPTOP

There are two things to change in this file then we can move to compiling and installing the new and improved kernel.

ident      LAPTOP
options    SCHED_ULE

That's all there is to it. I certainly hope that it works.

Hurrah, the book I ordered last week from amazon.co.uk has arrived and it's called "Building a Server With FreeBSD 7" by Bryan J. Hong, and I can't wait to read it

Sub-titles "A Modular Approach" it's full of valuable hints on how to install and configure your very own dream machine.

I'm a little bit weary about upgrading FreeBSD, but the new version has so many new features and improvements that I'd be foolish to wait much longer.

Appendix D gives a nice, succinct overview of the protocols.

One of the aggravating issues I still have is that my wifi connection will get dropped once in awhile, and the only way to reconnect is by manually running this script that I created.

Ideally I want to have this happen automatically, but much investigation and googling has turned up little information.

Someone mentioned that wpa_supplicant might offer a solution, so I'll have a look there when I get more time.

Those regular ssh attacks to my web server have been bugging me now for some time. Those jerks needed to be taught a lesson.

This evening I gathered up my courage and decided to finally do something about it. Printed out a document about firewalling, studied them well and became an expert in no time.

So I fired up the good old PF packet filter firewall, added a simple pass rule which inserts the baddies into a table, blocking them for good.

That's more like it.

I struggled last night into the wee hours of the morning scratching my head and yanking out my hair trying to figure out why I kept getting those awful 403 forbidden error pages when all I was trying to do was run a simple CGI-script.

That's when all of a sudden I realized that I had forgotten that all import asterisk, meaning that the correct apache directive should be:

<Directory /var/www/*>
    Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>


Let's be more careful the next time, alright?!

I upgraded my Gnome desktop to 2.20 and everything went perfectly well.

Well, almost.

My fonts looked overly large and botched, but this was quickly remedied by firing up the good old gnome-control-panel and changing the appearance of the fonts to 96 dots per inch.

Trying to get OpenVPN to work properly under FreeBSD is turning out to become quite a bear, e.g. a much bigger bummer than I had originally expected it to be.

Up to now all this effort has become almost a complete waste of time, because I haven't accomplished anything (though of course I've learned an awful lot).

What's funny is that according to the installation instructions it should be a piece of cake, but it isn't.

This is yet another ongoing goal in life which hopefully someday I will be able to resolve in my spare time, depending on how sharp my technical acumen remains.