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PHP 85 install

There were a slew of new packages for FreeBSD 15 on Sunday night, which I promptly installed Monday AM, taking the risk of not reading the UPDATING readme before hand.

Big mistake, as its bumped the default PHP version from 8.4 to 8.5. The install/upgrades seemed to go smoothly and a quick check of the all the installed PHP packages indeed showed they have installed smoothly and no remnants of 8.4 remained, or so I thought.

A quick reboot and disaster.. The website could not connect to the Database server. Mmmh, web page helpfully telling me that the php-mysqli extension was missing. Double check confirmed it wasn’t, but I reinstalled it just in case.

What I had missed and not automatically picked up was mod_phpXX had also been bumped, understandably to mod_php85 and it was this was the culprit to the erroneous error message, A quick pkg install of mod_php85 removed the offending 84 version and a apachectl restart was sufficient to fix the issue.

I should. have remembered from all those days rebuilding ports when I managed via Ports, but 6 months in I had got used to pkg to handle all the dependencies.

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Speedtest from the command line

I have been having issues with network speeds around the house, and down to the cabin. Downloads to the EE hub and first hop was generally fine, but at the farthest end where I used to get one 1 Gig, it had dropped to 100Mb.

Reseating the cable from the garage to the cabin did not do the trick, nor swapping out the switch for one I knew worked, didn’t either. Before I started messing around with the outside cable, I needed to prove the network connection to garage was fine.

As the server sits here, the simplest way was to install speedtest ( sudo pkg install ookla-speedtest ) so I could run a full cable test to there. Once installed its literally just >speedtest to kick off the standard Ookla test from the command line, no GUI needed. This proved that the network switch and feed to the garage was sound, meaning I need to dig up the garden to replace the buried network cable with a better grade cable this time.

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IOS 27 / WatchOS 27 pre-release – Walkie Talkie

Now that the public Beta of iOS27 has been out a while, I have pushed the 27 updates to my phone, watch and TV. So far the only noticeable update has been the removal of the WalkieTalkie App from the Watch. Not a massive loss, but was useful when running to call out live updates to fellow runners in the group if spread over a course, or when shopping with the family to coordinate when separated.

I have not yet noticed any improvements to Siri, but unclear if the backend has been switched over to Google yet and I don’t use it that often anyway.

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FreeBSD 15 r10 is out

I suspect we are now seeing the benefits of Project Glasswing and Anthropic Mythos bug hunting / security vulnerability detection with yet another incremental release to FreeBSD 15. This time 65 packages needed updating to move from r9 to r10, but as I am now using packages versus ports, it was much quicker to patch and reboot to get the latest protections in place.

Not to be left out, Anthropic released a sanitised version of Mythos, named Fable 5, which is meant to be a sandboxed version of Mythos, that won’t allow blackhats to subvert for deploying malware.

Bottle of Mythos Lager
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Where did April go?

I guess Easter and 2 weeks of nice weather meant I didn’t want or need to touch much. The release of Mythos has also meant a slew of new kernel releases for FreeBSD so short of being busy taking care of them, I have not made too many changes.

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Lights, Camera, Action

Have been busy with the house and adding additional garden/external lighting and then automating with Tapo S210 light switches so they can all be turned on remotely, or in case of the Garage light, as soon as the door opens.

It was mostly easy to swap over the original light switches, but the depth of the control unit on the switch, as it needs to accommodate two AA batteries meant with the curl of electrical cables coming into the pattress box it was all a bit tight. A quick check of Amazon and some 10mm spacers allowed the cables and cover to be fitted snuggly and now they are set up for both Tapo, Alexa and Apple HomeKit to control. The S210 need a Tapo hub, which is also the Matter bridge into HomeKit to function but now means the entire family can control them too.

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Busy Busy – but not here

I have not had much time recently to mess around with the server, but it’s been happily humming away and serving up content as required. Biggest challenge is the near constant IP address changes and I still have not fixed up a Dynamic DNS service to update my home IP every time it changes. Its not a real hardship as takes minutes to fix, but annoying all the same.

The Smarter internet enabled Kettle is still offline, it has been since about October and their tech support keep advising an App update is imminent to fix the issue, but being to ring hollow and I wonder if they can’t afford the cloud backend anymore to keep working. Updates to follow.

Other Tech success this month has been the redeployment of Derek, our Mowbot. I’ve relaid the control cables since we had the back garden landscaped and flattened the steep slope that would have caused him issues. Also with the few spring days we have had, I have successfully lowered its cutting height so the lawn is looking spic and span.