Posts tagged: FREEBSD

An energy conservation law from 2005 makes Daylight Savings Time (quaint US custom) begin earlier this year – this coming Sunday, to be exact. It’s supposed to be saving us energy, but I’m not sure if the upgrade costs were factored in. Anyway, I have a couple FreeBSD servers that needed the update. Went like this:

sudo portinstall misc/zoneinfo
sudo tzsetup

It took three times longer to find this information (buried at the bottom of this notice) than it did to implement the fix.

$ sudo portupgrade php5 php5-curl php5-sqlite php5-bla bla bla...
--->  Upgrading 'php5 bla bla bla...'
...
[Updating the pkgdb bla bla... done]
$ sudo apachectl graceful
$

My last post was about a server migration at work; this one’s about moving my own stuff, an operation completed late last night. It was easier in that it’s less critical (nobody’s likely to freak out if my blog disappears for a day) but harder in that it also involved mail. I hate dealing with mail; though I did manage the switch without losing any, as far as I know. My thanks to the JohnCompanies.com staff for helping this go smoothly.

Another in a weekly series of unearthings.

Two years ago my titanium PowerBook died and I took an unplanned six-week leave from OS X. Afterward I wrote up my experiences in an essay called “FreeBSD, KDE and Me” (you might miss the title reference if you’re not of a certain generation). Within 24 hours the essay had gotten about 10,000 page views – easily the most popular thing I had ever posted.

Introduction

I’ve been a confirmed Mac Person since at least 1992, when I bought my first PowerBook, if not since 1984, when I first doodled in MacPaint.

But I’ve used a lot of different platforms over the years, from CP/M to MS-DOS to Windows to Classic MacOS to OS X. I play with other operating systems to retain perspective on MacOS’s strengths and weaknesses; to learn things relevant to my work as a web developer; to hedge my bets in case I decide to jump ship someday; and, of course, to waste time in classic geek fashion.