Yesterday, Imani asked me if I would host her
falconry blog. I decided that it probably wasn't a huge security threat to do so (though Wordpress always makes me a bit nervous), so I went about setting up some stuff to make it possible.
This, of course, led me to realize that many of the packages on
freasha were woefully out of date. I'm also running a version of NetBSD that is old enough to be out of support, so I got to do the fun task of downloading and installing packages built for (slightly) newer versions of NetBSD and hoping that I didn't have any crazy dependency failures.
NetBSD's package system (pkgsrc) is somewhat odd compared to other managers. Although it does dependency resolution, it doesn't seem to offer an easy way of upgrading one package to a later version. Instead, you have to delete one package and install the newer version thereof. Complicating this, the tool will not uninstall a package which is satisfying the dependencies of other packages unless you use the force option. This led to me doing perhaps too many "pkg_delete -f"s followed immediately by "pkg_add"s.
The only real issue that I had was with Apache. It seems that the version that I upgraded to separates almost all of the once compiled in functionality into loadable modules. This meant playing the fun game of 1) try to start websever, 2) webserver barfs on some config file directive, 3) me googling for the relevant directive, 4) me adding a line to my httpd.conf telling it to load the module. In total, I went from loading two modules previously (php and dav_svn) to loading 15 different ones (including such standbys as the 'log_config' module, the rewrite module, and the MIME module).
On the plus side, though, I finally updated my awstats configuration so that I get per-site stats now rather than aggregating stats across the whole server. This is most useful for
the004show.com and for Imani's new site. It has been informative in learning about the somewhat bizarre search phrases that bring people to my site. I'll probably never understand why I get search results for "kiss on the bobs anime". No, that's not a typo. Apparently, some bobs needed kissing.
I'm rather sure this is not the best of all possible worlds.
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