July 10th, 2017
Now running PHP 5.6.31
Posted at
07:30:24 PM by
froems
For the first time in almost half a year, a new version of PHP 5.6 was released, so I compiled and installed it. Everything still seems to be working fine after installation.
June 28th, 2017
Now running Apache 2.4.26
Posted at
05:49:08 PM by
froems
I've upgraded the web server to version 2.4.26, which was released nine days ago. Everything seems to be working fine after the upgrade.
May 16th, 2017
Now running HTTPS from Let's Encrypt!
Posted at
02:16:53 AM by
froems
We are now serving up a secure site using HTTPS/SSL! Many thanks to the team at Let's Encrypt for providing a free verified SSL certificate. Most of the SSL certificate authorities out there wanted $100 per year or more, which is why it took me so long to get around to implementing it here.
I tried generating the certificate using Certbot first, but Certbot didn't seem to play well with Slackware. So I used Neilpang's acme.sh to generate the certificate instead, which worked perfectly on the first try. A few tweaks to httpd.conf were made, and we're now serving up secure content!
May 14th, 2017
Now running Slackware 14.2!
Posted at
02:23:15 AM by
froems
After nearly a year of putting it off, I finally performed the upgrade.
It broke almost everything. First, it was still running the old Linux kernel when I rebooted, and LILO wasn't working. I soon realized that the server was a newer machine designed for Windows 10, and I had to use ELILO instead because it was compatible with the machine's Win10-compatible BIOS.
First reboot on the new kernel ended in a kernel panic because I was using the generic kernel. Fortunately, I had set ELILO to prompt to use the old kernel as a backup choice, used the old kernel after rebooting, then set up ELILO again to point to the huge new kernel image, and after the reboot the machine came up on the new kernel.
However, the USB enclosure wasn't working, it was throwing off the same errors as before. I had to uninstall the eudev packages completely and use the old version of udev (165), then cold-reboot after turning off the server and the USB enclosure for about ten minutes or so, and the new kernel was finally able to handshake to the ancient USB enclosure without all of those errors. Unfortunately, it had been over two years since the server had been rebooted with that enclosure, so it had to run a two-hour file system check.
So then, everything is up and running, right? Wrong. The Perl upgrade broke all of the old Perl packages, and I couldn't even connect to CPAN without having a memory fault. I had to wipe all of the old Perl packages and reinstall them all from scratch starting with CPAN.
Then I recompiled the web server with Apache httpd 2.4.25 (finally running 2.4 after all these years!), mod_perl 2.0.10, and php 5.6.30 (skipping the 5.5 releases entirely), and it all went surprisingly smooth. Just a few minor updates to httpd.conf were in order.
The last thing to fix were a few sudo scripts that had broken. Investigation showed that sudo no longer inherited environment variables unless you run visudo to explicitly allow that. So I did.
And now, we're up and running on Slackware 14.2, and I still have one day left this weekend!
August 4th, 2016
Slackware 14.2 now available
Posted at
08:39:54 PM by
froems
It's been almost three years, but a new version of Slackware is now available. I'll probably look into installing it soon. I wonder if it comes with a version of udev that's compatible with the old RAID array this thing uses.
December 28th, 2015
Now running PHP 5.4.45
Posted at
04:35:42 AM by
froems
I just upgraded PHP 5.4 to its final release. Apparently PHP 5.4 has reached its end of life, and I'll have to move to 5.5 eventually.
July 31st, 2015
And now running Apache 2.2.31
Posted at
11:52:42 PM by
froems
I had installed the new version of PHP before checking to see if there was a new version of HTTPD. Lo and behold, there was. So I compiled and installed that, then recompiled PHP for the newer version of apxs.
July 31st, 2015
Now running PHP 5.4.43
Posted at
11:31:28 PM by
froems
Upgraded PHP and everything seems to be okay. I had to upgrade freetype to freetype-2.5.5-x86_64-2.txz from slackware-current first because the old version of freetype was looking for an old version of libpng, which I had upgraded while trying to get KDE working.
This time I configured PHP with --enable-mbstring before compiling, because I might want to use some of the mbstring functions in a project.
July 5th, 2015
Now running the 3.18.11 kernel
Posted at
08:12:20 AM by
froems
I wanted to see if I could get KDE running on the server, even though I don't really need it.
The first time I tried to run it, startx would fail. Reading through xorg.0.log, I determined that the problem was due to the server's Intel Broadwell 5500 graphics, which was too new and was unsupported by the Linux kernel that came with Slackware 14.1.
So, I installed the
kernel-huge-3.18.11-x86_64-1.txz and
kernel-modules-3.18.11-x86_64-1.txz packages from
slackware-current. Once I was able to get the new kernel running, I found that this wasn't enough to fix the problem itself, so I also installed the video driver package
xf86-video-intel-2.99.917-x86_64-1.txz from
slackware-current.
I then started receiving messages about an incorrect ABI version. So I installed
xorg-server-1.16.4-x86_64-1.txz from
slackware-current. This resolved the ABI version but there were still some dependencies that required upgrading, which were the
libpng-1.6.16-x86_64-1.txz and
libxshmfence-1.2-x86_64-1.txz packages from
slackware-current.
Finally, KDE was able to start, but there was no keyboard or mouse support. I had to go back to
slackware-current one more time to install the
xf86-input-mouse-1.9.1-x86_64-2.txz and
xf86-input-keyboard-1.8.0-x86_64-2.txz packages.
And with all of that done, I was finally able to get KDE running with the mouse and keyboard working.
I don't think I'm even going to use it. I just wanted to see if I could get it to work.
June 27th, 2015
Running new server: Intel i7 5500U, 16GB RAM, 64-bit Slackware 14.1
Posted at
06:28:07 AM by
froems
The old server, which served us well for almost a decade, finally burned out. Literally, the CPU heatsink seems to have gone bad and its CPU was running temperatures of 200+ degrees and constantly shutting down. So it was time to upgrade.
The new server is running a 64 bit version of Slackware 14.1, Apache 2.2.29, PHP 5.4.42. I rolled back udev from 182 to 165 because I was having the same problem with the new server seeing the RAID array.
I've spent the last week copying over everything from the old server to the new, and it looks like everything is working again.
Also, I saw that mod_perl 2.0.9 is finally out with Apache 2.4 support. I'll have to look into moving to Apache 2.4 now, when I have time.
