What's taking so long for FreeBSD 7 ?

df-sean

Verified User
Joined
Feb 8, 2007
Messages
51
Hey guys, not to be rude, but.... FreeBSD 7 was released in February 2008 (almost a year ago). The current release version is 7.1.

Can we please get stable DA for FreeBSD 7 sometime before FreeBSD 8 comes out?

:rolleyes:
 
It's still listed as "beta/unstable".

The problem is during installation. Important point is that I installed FreeBSD 7.0 several months back with no issues at all. Then a couple months ago, I tried FreeBSD 7.1beta which failed in the exact same way as 7.1-release did yesterday.

Steps to repeat:

1. Install fresh FreeBSD 7.1

2. Install DA license with custombuild and php/apache defaults

3. Installer barfs on wget error as always

4. Compile DA custom wget package as instructed on DA site

5. Start installer again

6. Installer finishes with errors -- unable to compile PHP, etc. Recommends running custombuild -d all again.

7. More errors. Sorry I can't remember specifics, but from memory, MySQL installation is broken (can't be started), PHP still needs to be compiled again, Apache installation is broken (can't write to logs). In short, a very broken system.

Any one else having this kind of trouble?
 
scsi said 7 was working not 7.1 The website says that 7.0 is in beta but that generally works. 7.1 is not listed at all.

Now you say:
Important point is that I installed FreeBSD 7.0 several months back with no issues at all.

Question answered. You asked about 7 and you say 7.0 works.

7.1 is a whole other question. Maybe you should be more specific in your questions the first time you ask them.
 
Sorry if my question wasn't specific. But my the essence of my question is the subject "What's talking so long for FreeBSD 7 ?".

The DA site lists support for FreeBSD 7.x (notice the "x" as opposed to a "0") as "Beta/Unstable".

To me this means that in some cases it will work fine and in other cases it won't. And this appears to be exactly what's happening.

Not trying to start any wars here. Just wondering when we can expect FreeBSD 7.x/DA to be considered "stable" and work more reliably.
 
Floyd, you hit a lot of buttons on that one :).

Never tell a FreeBSD user to use CentOS.

That's almost as bad as telling a linux user to use FreeBSD :).

It's a religious thing. :D.

That said, even though my first hosting platform was Slackware Linux, we used BSD/OS for years. The company was bought out by WindRiver, who raised the support and licensing costs dramatically, about the same time we started looking at the early Cobalt RaQs (my first ones were the RaQ2 models). So we slowly and painfully moved back to Linux.

Since Cobalt RaQs were running a spinoff of Red Hat Linux, when we left them (or rather, when Sun abandoned us), we used Red Hat Linux, and then later Whitebox Linux and CentOS Linux, as we moved on, first to Plesk (we were a Gold Partner) and then to DirectAdmin.

The trip, down a long and winding road, was certainly worth it to us.

Jeff
 
I'd give anything for a decent control panel like DA but which worked WITH the FreeBSD ports system rather than against it ;-)
 
Installation Problem Is Solved!

For anyone else that might encounter this... I've found that by changing two things about the way I installed DA has resolved all my problems (not entirely sure which change is responsible for the fix).

1. DON'T "touch .custombuild" before installing. This is no longer necessary since DA gives you the option to choose customapache or custombuild.

2. DON'T install *any* packages before installing DA. Obviously, no apache, myqsl, etc. But also, not even bash for example. I noticed that bash pulled in a couple of dependencies like libiconv and gettext. I think there might have been version inconsistencies that were causing custombuild to lose its marbles.

I've always installed bash and portupgrade straight away after installing FreeBSD, then I proceed to DA install. Never had a problem before. But anyway, after making sure of those two things above, I'm able to install just fine with no issues so far.

Except just one... The wget issue still requires intervention as explained here:
http://help.directadmin.com/item.php?id=77
 
7.1-stable works like a charm

FreeBSD websrv01.xxxx 7.1-STABLE FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE #4 r186904: Thu Jan 8 19:11:44 CET 2009 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/WEBSRV01 i386

We use Directadmin on our i386 7.1-STABLe machine for ages and that works fine. I custom compiled all packages (including PHP which might have one flaw with it so that the marina skin does not work (yet)) and no one ever complained to us that it isn't working.

And no, it didn't help me so far being a FreeBSD committer, I just took over the configuration in the 'configure.x' files that are in the custombuild directory and made several symlinks. I am still trying to free up time to rewrite custombuild for FreeBSD so that it can use the actual ports-system instead of doing the "interesting" recompile thing with a thing that is not actually the thing to do for FreeBSD users, sadly time is an issue for most of us ;-)

//Remko
FreeBSD Committer
 
For that hardware config, you might consider using a 64-bit OS to take advantage of all that RAM. If it needs to work with DA, I think you're stuck with CentOS for 64-bit support.

Personally, my biggest complaint about FreeBSD/DA isn't the age of the packages. It's the fact that by reinventing the wheel with DA packages instead of using FreeBSD ports, it ruins one of the best features of FreeBSD -- the ports system.

For example, to install mod_python on FreeBSD is a simple one-liner with the ports system. But not if Apache was installed by DA. In that case, ports will try to reinstall a non-DA blessed version of Apache as a required dependency of mod_python and things quickly go haywire. So this means you have to install mod_python from source and you can't really use the ports system. And this is a common source of headaches for me with other packages too.

For me, the Holy Grail would be a FreeBSD 64-bit version of DA which works *with* the ports system rather than against it :)

</rant>
 
Well i got a 64-bit FreeBSD 6.4 running DA right now with lib32 enabled.
I had to manually compile almost everything...
So now I try to upgrade to 7.1 using freebsd-update, so the current 4-core 8GB ram system will work decentlye with less LOCKs

Let's see were it will get us...

p.s.: don't even try to tell me anything about linux =), that's just hurting my feelings
 
I've long wanted DA to use the ports when installed on FreeBSD. It is indeed unfortunate that it does not. We've struggled installing Da on FreeBSD 7.0 in combination with ports but it didn't work out all too well. Hitting snag after snag (the biggest example is the libiconv/*csh segfault problem). Getting it to work and then to find out that Installatron can't connect to mysql, no matter what was also something that took the wind out of our sails, so we just gave up after 5 weeks or trial and error.
 
I never got any information from anyone that things do not work or something. 64bit system with 32bit compat shims might work out best indeed.

Installatron might have used /tmp/mysql.sock or something, which is placed somehwere else on the FreeBSD system, creating a symbolic link might have fixed that, but given that you stopped trying, this might no longer be resolved.

Please, anyone that encounters something, let me know and I might be able to help out.

Note that by having libiconv from ports I never -ever- got a coredump for csh...

Thanks,
Remko
 
I never got any information from anyone that things do not work or something. 64bit system with 32bit compat shims might work out best indeed.

Installatron might have used /tmp/mysql.sock or something, which is placed somehwere else on the FreeBSD system, creating a symbolic link might have fixed that, but given that you stopped trying, this might no longer be resolved.

Well, I did post here and here. MySQL wasn't the only problem. There were problems with SuPHP, apache, just a multitude really. but then again, it might just be due to that howto I followed to combine DA & FreeBSD's ports (see below).

Note that by having libiconv from ports I never -ever- got a coredump for csh...
Neither have I. But I have had coredumps with the libiconv installed by DA's installation script which required me to reinstall libiconv from ports. I'm also not the only one.
 
Wow nicely done! Please let us know how your upgrade goes.
Ok so I've done the upgrade. After
Code:
/usr/sbin/freebsd-update -r 7.1-RELEASE upgrade && /usr/sbin/freebsd-update -r 7.1-RELEASE install
check if everything is still ok
Code:
shutdown -r
then
Code:
/usr/sbin/freebsd-update install
(also had to edit some files at this point using vi - goddammit why not ee!?)
then
Code:
portsnap -I update
(if it asks for something just give it to it, it may ask for fetching and extracting the pkgdb or something, don't remember, but nonetheless do what it asks to.)
Had a bunch of problems with libpthreads and old libs
first with the libs -
Code:
cd /usr/ports/misc/compat6x; make; make install
then with that bug of libpthreads a shell script
Code:
#!/bin/sh
#Fix For /usr/bin/ld: /usr/lib/libpthread.a(thr_syscalls.o): relocation R_X86_64_32S can not be used when making a shared object; recompile with -fPIC
#/usr/lib/libpthread.a: could not read symbols: Bad value
#Thanx Mel_Flynn on forums.freebsd.org

mkdir /tmp/pthread.bkp
mv /usr/lib/libpthread* /tmp/pthread.bkp/
cd /usr/lib
for ext in .a .so _p.a; do
    ln -vs libthr$ext libpthread$ext
done
Than just do
Code:
portupgrade -af
again.
I've also encountered a bug in ImageMagick and Perl installed from sources on 7.1, maybe because of the old version, but the ports version installed seamlessly in this Release.
then I had to ./build apache and ./build php5-cli and recompile my mysql from sources to catch the new threads (I don't like binaries and I don't like ports setup unless DA makes it compatible with current DA setup).
The system is now working great.
Because of compat6.x I didn't have to recompile all the other stuff which is obviously not the point of my upgrade. But anyways when there'll be new Custombuild stuff i'll try to upgrade it || not on this server, because it's the clients one.

Cheers guys, almost 7+ hours to figure all of this and google all the bugs. Hope this will be useful for somebody.
 
Last edited:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/announce.html

As of yesterday FreeBSD is not supporting 7.0. That means no more security updates. DA has really dropped the ball with it's BSD support imho. Today I am upgrading to 7.1 branch and I hope all goes well but if I need to fight to get it all working so be it. I still want the 64-bit BSD version too. I can't stand having to run the 32 bit binaries on a quad-core. It's ridiculous.

bought out by WindRiver, who raised the support and licensing costs dramatically, about the same time we started looking at the early Cobalt RaQs (my first ones were the RaQ2 models). So we slowly and painfully moved back to Linux.

Since Cobalt RaQs were running a spinoff of Red Hat Linux, when we left them (or rather, when Sun abandoned us), we used Red Hat Linux, and then later Whitebox Linux and CentOS Linux, as we moved on, first to Plesk (we were a Gold Partner) and then to DirectAdmin.

Spooky. I started with the raq2 as well. Cobalt made imho some impressive machines. At least until Sun bought them and destroyed the low-end server market in one purchase. That has always annoyed me.

I then ran Plesk a few years. Eventually they also moved up in pricing and to be honest I was never that happy with Plesk. They also were bought and that's when their pricing got high.

Then I went FreeBSD around 4.11 I think. Been there ever since. I used webmin for a short time but really it wasn't suitable for my needs. I could probably deal with webmin now but of course I have a lifetime license for DA. So as long as DA supports the latest version of BSD I will use it. It doesn't look however this is going to be true much longer at this rate.

For me, the Holy Grail would be a FreeBSD 64-bit version of DA which works *with* the ports system rather than against it :)

I agree but realistically I doubt DA will bother. To me an even better solution would be a similar commercial package that was dedicated to FreeBSD. DA isn't cutting it and neither is Webmin.
 
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