Raven's Journal

shutdown the steam client

Find your config.vdf file.

On ubuntu or debian installs, sometimes in home directory:
.steam/debian-installation/config

Run this on it:
sed -i -e '/"SurveyDate"/ s/"[0-9].*"/"'$(date +%Y-%m-%d -d "1 year ago")'"/' config.vdf

A lot of people have fond memories of their first concert. I am struggling to figure out what mine was.

The first concert I went to without my parents is easy, that's Jewel in Sept. 97.

In 1988, we had gone to opryland usa and I figured out last night we saw the oakridge boys and cumberland boys. (christian music)

I also remember going to a series of concerts along the flint river sometime in the mid 80s. I think we may have seen reo speedwagon and grand funk railroad but I'm not certain.

We did our first package build run and there are a few areas we need to work on before a release can happen.

rust and binutils are broken. This is holding up a lot of things.

The MidnightBSD project does get some funding from Patreon users, and it's greatly appreciated.

Our current infra spending breaks down like this (monthly):

OVH: $180 (UK mirror)
AWS: $250
Business cable connection for hosting the project: $430

Additionally, we have hardware and electricity costs. Our rack idles around 300 watts these days.

We're currently running on:
ryzen 5700x 64GB (to be retired soon)
HPE DL360 gen 10 (2x20 core xeon) 256GB RAM
HPE DL360 gen9 (2x18 core xeon) 160GB RAM
HPE DL20 gen9 (quad core Xeon) 32GB RAM (firewall)
Aruba Instant on 1960xt (10G copper and fiber switch)
Engenius 2.5G 8-port switch
cable modem/router
HPE microserver Gen10 plus (xeon)
HPE microserver Gen8 (opteron)

An update on hardware upgrades:

I've migrated two of the three servers to the new HPE DL360 GEN10 server. This should result in a little less power consumption and a lot more compute power. We're still waiting on a drive that had to be RMA'd for the remaining server.

So far, we've migrated our database and one of our virtualization servers over to the new hardware. The virtualization server runs Jenkins, magus build nodes, logging infrastructure, and a few other things.

We've also taken the opportunity to migrate a number of services on the database server into their own jails using Bastille.

Packages

We've refreshed packages for i386 and amd64 3.2 systems. This included a number of security updates and a large jump in total packages available.

4.0 CURRENT progress

Current work has been progressing slowly, in part because I'm recovering from COVID. I also wanted to get the new hardware in place to help with builds.

The kernel is working, but there are a few things in userland broken at the moment. I'm working through those as I find them. The original plan was to release in May but that's obviously been delayed. I don't have an ETA on the release right now.

AWS & MidnightBSD

Amazon recently took down our AWS marketplace listing because the software was old and had a security issue. The last attempt we made to update it resulted in a rejection. They wouldn't test it manually and their automated tools can't handle the alternate partition and file system to scan it.

I've been working on a different approach to build images for AWS in hopes of refreshing them more often. The project does use them and the current approach was to install and then update manually. This is a big hassle. It would also be nice if we could support newer instance types as we are currently limited to old hardware (like t2 instances)

We do publish image ids for aws us-east-1 on the midnightbsd download page for folks who want to run them manually without marketplace.

Our hardware upgrade is still in progress. We've managed to migrate almost 2 physical servers infra to a new box.

There is one more server to migrate, but we're going to wait on that. One service is left from the second server and it's lower priority.

* Firefox 138.0.3
* Thunderbird 138.0.1
* LibreOffice 25.2.2
* TeXLive 20250308
* Darktable 5.0.1
* Okular 25.04.1
* VLC 3.0.21
* Mesa 25.05
* Qemu 10.0
* GCC 14.2.0
* LLVM 20.1.4
* Go 1.24.3
* Rust 1.86.0
* Rvn 1.0.2

You can visit /users/YourUsername/json to get the feed.

For example, https://www.justjournal.com/users/jjsite/json

added sensors script by Slawomir Wojciech Wojtczak & Trix Farrar

v3 from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/vermaden/scripts/master/sensors.sh

Similar to the sensors output on linux, but limited.

There is overlap with batt(1) but still useful.

MidnightBSD 3.2.3 ISOs are uploading to mirrors.

Changes in this version are mostly third-party dependencies:

OpenSSH 9.9p2

tcpdump 4.99.5

expat 2.7.1

fix for xz CVE-2025-31115

unbound 1.22.0

And the MidnightBSD package manager, mport, was updated to 2.6.8.

Important notes:

1. An issue with the firstboot script was fixed after this release. It won't hurt anything per se, but there was still code in there to start hald. It will be included in the next release. (thanks ykla)

2. mport 2.6.8 does have a few bugs, particularly with removing a lot of packages at once. This was fixed in later versions, but mport 2.7.x isn't ready for broad release yet. (3.2.0 shipped with mport 2.6.0 and 3.2.2 had mport 2.6.4)

3. There are a number of CVEs fixed in this release related to OpenSSH, unbound, expat, xz, and tcpdump.

I've had many issues on JustJournal with weird characters appearing in posts. The issue appears to be that Grammarly + CKEditor creates unprintable characters in the text to track spelling suggestions. I'm working on a solution to clean up the text.

We released a new version of JJ with a lot of security fixes and improvements. 

The XML-RPC 'blogger' client compatibility had to be dropped as the library we used has been unmaintained for many years.  The rtf export was also removed due to licensing issues with new versions.

A new mport-manager, graphical package manager release, 0.23 is now available in mports and on github.

There's a new mport package manager release. https://github.com/MidnightBSD/mport/tree/2.7.0…

 Due to its massive changes, we're not going to merge it yet into the os. (for one thing, the build will change a lot)

It does bump the master database version. There is a new table for storing conflicts. We don't make them visible in commands, but it will help with debugging the state when a package was added. Conflict detection is done at install time using the data in the package currently.

I'm starting to see software that requires C++20 std::range functions such as MySQL 8.4+.  This is a blocker for older LLVM versions on some operating systems.  (versions before 17 don't fully support it, and even then there are still one or two optional things)

Micronaut 3.9.4 does not support disabling compression in HTTP server responses.  There is a workaround though.  

Create a CustomHttpCompressionStrategy bean

@Primary
@Singleton
public class CustomHttpCompressionStrategy implements HttpCompressionStrategy {
public boolean shouldCompress(io.netty.handler.codec.http.HttpResponse response) { 
return false;
} 

public int getCompressionLevel() {

return 0;
}
}

Verse 1:
I’m outdated, can’t you see?
These dependencies are killing me.
Versions lagging, what a mess,
APIs need some freshness.Chorus:
I’m outdated, oh it’s clear,
Time to update, let’s shift the gear.
Dependencies, they’re holding tight,
Gotta fix this, make it right!Verse 2:
Old libraries, they just won’t play,
Security risks in every way.
I’m stuck here with legacy code,
Need to lighten this heavy load.Chorus:
I’m outdated, oh it’s clear,
Time to update, let’s shift the gear.
Dependencies, they’re holding tight,
Gotta fix this, make it right!Bridge:
Let’s refactor, clean it up,
With newer tools we’ll fill the cup.
APIs can shine so bright,
When we update and do it right!Chorus:
I’m outdated, oh it’s clear,
Time to update, let’s shift the gear.
Dependencies, they’re holding tight,
Gotta fix this, make it right!Outro:
So let’s move on and take a stand,
With fresh updates we’ll be grand.
No more worries in the night,
We’ll keep our APIs running right!

There's a utility called ddresuce that can be used to read corrupted files from various file systems.  

First pass:
ddrescue -n -v /path/to/source_file /path/to/destination_file logfile

Second pass using same logfile:

ddrescue -d -r3 /path/to/source_file /path/to/destination_file logfile

This can often read or partially read files and can skip bad blocks.

So I struggled getting FreeBSD or MidnightBSD ipv6 working on OVH.  The instructions are a little off.  The prefixlen has to be larger than it's allocated (for 64 it needs to be 56) and this is because the gateway ip is not in the /64 block.  It won't route no matter what you do with static routes, fe80 link locals, etc.

$RecallEnabled = Dism /online /Get-FeatureInfo /FeatureName:Recall | findstr /B /C:"State" If ($RecallEnabled -Match 'State : Enabled') { DISM /Online /Disable-Feature /featurename:Recall }else{Write-Host "Recall Disabled" }