Just a quick update to let everyone know that the pfSense book which I mentioned previously is now available from Amazon.

I haven’t been posting much lately, as per usual, and also as per usual I keep thinking I’ll get around to posting more. Well, this little tidbit does deserve a new post:

These past few months I’ve been working with the great folks behind pfSense, an awesome FreeBSD-based firewall system that has really impressed me at every turn. We’ve been using it quite a bit at work over the past year, so I’ve been contributing back in the form of documentation, code, testing, and other help wherever I can.

Along the way I started working with one of the project’s co-founders, Chris Buechler, on a book for the project.  It’s now available from several retailers, and more will be coming soon.

So if you are interested in pfSense, FreeBSD, firewalls, or other related concepts, you’re bound to find something useful in our book:

pfSense: The Definitive Guide to the pfSense Open Source Firewall and Router Distribution
by Christopher M. Buechler and Jim Pingle

It’s being published by Reed Media Services, and is now available Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

By their request, my wife Destany and I have been taking pictures of her former high school marching band, The Pride of Paoli (From Paoli Jr-Sr High School in Paoli, Indiana) this year. We’ve posted the pictures at http://popgallery.pingle.org/.

So far we have pictures up from the Salem Invitational, Regional at Jeffersonville, and Semi-State at Franklin.

For more information, or to view the pictures, visit the site above.

Enjoy!

I’m well aware that it’s been more than a year since my last post. There has been plenty to write about, but nothing I’ve really taken the time to post for public consumption.

Hopefully some more stuff will show up in the not-too-distant future.

Lately this site has been overrun with comment and trackback spam, not that it shows because I moderate everything. Still, my inbox has been full of junk because of it. I enabled a CAPTCHA image on comment posts. I hope this isn’t much of an inconvenience, but it was either this or disable comments completely. I also disabled trackbacks site-wide. I never used trackbacks anyhow, so it’s no big loss.

I don’t receive many comments, but when I do they are usually meaningful or informative in some way, so I did not want to drop them.

Now, if I can just find the time to post more often…

As I wrote about previously, I have had problems with Apache and PHP crashing due to various PHP Extensions. I have come upon another combination that triggers a problem, but after investigating it a little I see that it’s been reported before, and nobody wants to fix it. PHP blames PHP accelerator systems, and Zend claims it’s a shared memory configuration problem (it isn’t — at least on my system)

The error happens whenever attempting a graceful restart of Apache via “apachectl graceful”:

• [notice] seg fault or similar nasty error detected in the parent process

The environment:

• Apache 2.2.4
• PHP 5.2.1
• Zend Optimizer 3.2.8

The culprit:

• Some interaction between the Zend Optimizer being loaded along with the PHP pspell module.

If I disable one or the other, the crash goes away. Since this particular installation does not require the pspell module, I disabled it and things have been stable ever since.

I did follow Zend’s recommendations for increasing certain shared memory tunables on FreeBSD, as well as trying to recompile everything involved. For more information on shared memory tuning check the FreeBSD man page tuning(7) as well as this Zend Knowledge Base article. Note that certain sysctl settings may only be modified at boot time via /boot/loader.conf and/or /etc/sysctl.conf.

More information to come if I can find anything else…

Update 11/21/2007 – I found that in more recent version of PHP (Around 5.2.4-5.2.5) having pspell.so loaded before spl.so in extensions.ini will result in crashes when an httpd process is stopped/killed. Moving pspell anywhere after spl will clear this up (so far…).

We lucky folks in Indiana have had a rough two years dealing with time. As I wrote about last year, Indiana just started observing Daylight Saving Time (DST) in 2006. Now, for 2007 we also have to change the dates on which DST starts and ends. DST now begins on the second Sunday in March, and ends on the first Sunday in November — This year it’s March 11th and Nov 4th. Why on earth we didn’t just wait to start along with the new rules is anyone’s guess. <rant>I don’t think we should be using DST at all, but that’s a story for another time</rant>

Here I was, all set for another round of server updates, reboots, etc. Turns out that I didn’t need to worry quite so much. When I updated all of the time zone files on our servers last year for Indiana’s initial DST switch, they had already made the changes with the new start and end dates for 2007 and beyond. You can confirm this on most UNIX systems as follows:

# zdump -v /etc/localtime | grep 2007
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 06:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 01:59:59 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000
/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 11 07:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Mar 11 03:00:00 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 05:59:59 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:59:59 2007 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400
/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  4 06:00:00 2007 UTC = Sun Nov  4 01:00:00 2007 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

If it says “Mar 11″ and “Nov 4″ you’re good. If it says “Apr 1″ and “Oct 28″ you need to update your time zone definitions. On FreeBSD, this can be as simple as downloading new zoneinfo files, recompiling them, and re-selecting the timezones:

1. Download: ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007b.tar.gz
2. Exctact the contents to /usr/src/share/zoneinfo
3. cd /usr/src/share/zoneinfo; make install
4. tzsetup
5. Choose your time zone again.

A reboot may be necessary to ensure that all running programs are on the same time zone. Currently running programs may not pick up the change. You could also update FreeBSD to a recent version, which includes these changes. If you choose to do the OS update, be sure to run “tzsetup” afterward to be absolutely certain that a new tz file gets installed to /etc/localtime. After you’re done, re-run the zdump command above to be check that you now have the proper DST change dates for 2007.

If you are running any Cisco gear (or other IOS-alike devices) this should work to make the change:

clock timezone EST -5
clock summer-time EDT recurring 2 Sun Mar 2:00 1 Sun Nov 2:00

Adjust the time zone to yours, of course.

There may be other programs that handle time zone data internally (such as Java and Outlook) so you’ll have to be sure there are no loose ends in that department. Those of us in Indiana have some practice with this, so at least for us it may not be that bad.

I am aware that many of these problems could be avoided by using UTC on all our server clocks. While that may be preferable, we like to have everything in local time. It’s a choice, and we deal with the consequences. One of which is we never schedule jobs to run overnight between 1-3am — they could be run twice or not at all.

UPDATE: 3/1/07: I have also been informed that you can copy the “/etc/localtime” file from an updated system to any other system that needs it. This could be especially useful if you are unable to update all of the Time Zone definitions for any particular reason.

Once again when faced with updating PHP on a few servers, I encountered my favorite of all PHP quirks: After rebuilding extensions, PHP crashes and/or takes Apache down with it. Here are the errors that tend to show up:

• exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
• exited on signal 6 (core dumped)
• seg fault or similar nasty error detected in the parent process

And my personal favorite:

• httpd in free(): error: junk pointer, too high to make sense

I have seen this on PHP4 and PHP5, and with Apache 1.3 and 2.x. I’m not sure if it’s a problem inherent to how the FreeBSD ports system builds and installs the modules or if it’s just a problem in general. I had read once upon a time that rebuilding extensions in a certain order would fix it, and it did. I never got around to figuring out why this worked. Turns out, rebuilding them doesn’t really matter, but the order of the extensions being loaded does. Rebuilding fixed it because when a php extension port is rebuilt, it gets placed at the end of extensions.ini. I solved the problem by editing /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini and placing the lines for mysql, imap, and sockets at the end and in that order:

...
extension=mysql.so
extension=imap.so
extension=sockets.so

I’m not sure if the conflict is only with those three, or with others as well, but that fixes it on my servers. I tried it on three different setups, and before the change they all crashed and after the change they’re all running OK.

Hopefully if anyone else runs across this, it will help. If I get more time, I’ll dig into it more later.

Update (11/25/06):
There has been some more discussion of this on the FreeBSD-Ports mailing list and the FreeBSD-STABLE mailing list. Apparently at least part of this is due to the PHP recode, MySQL, and IMAP extension ordering. These extensions rely on c-client libraries with different overloaded hash functions. So the “magic” order at the end of extensions.ini should be:

...
extension=recode.so
extension=mysql.so
extension=imap.so
extension=sockets.so

There is also talk of building some logic into the PHP extension ports to ensure the ordering of the extensions so as to avoid this bug. Best of luck to those working on it!

Edit 8/25/07: I wrote a very hackish shell script that gets the job done keeping the extensions in this order. It’s not pretty, but it works. It can be found here: http://www.pingle.org/files/fixphpextorder.sh. Read the full post here.

Edit 11/21/07: Lately pspell has also become picky about ordering. I recommend placing it at the end (or at least anywhere after spl.so)

...
extension=recode.so
extension=mysql.so
extension=imap.so
extension=sockets.so
extension=pspell.so

Due to my recent bad luck with electricity, I was using my home server as a desktop all last week. As a result, I have some more notes to add about using FreeBSD as a Desktop machine, which I hope others may find useful.

Read on for more about Printing, Firefox and Thunderbird interoperability, mounting a USB mass storage device, CD burning with K3B, and Video playback.

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So a week ago I had a rather nasty shock. I was watching a TV show that I was playing on my laptop, which was hooked up to my DVD Recorder via S-Video and composite audio cables. Nothing I hadn’t done a few dozen times before. The difference was: I realized that I had not plugged in the laptop’s power cord. When I proceeded to plug in the laptop — *poof* — sparks flew and smoke rolled out of the laptop from under the headphone jacks. It’s an Acer not a Dell so this was truly a surprise :)

After some minor panicing, I found that the laptop would still boot (thankfully) but the audio was dead. I presume the S-Video port was also dead, but I was not about to test it. Sadly, my DirecTivo was also fried (also connected to the DVD Recorder via S-Video) but the DVD recorder is just fine. The jolt also fried a segment of coax cable between the Tivo and the Satellite dish: Specifically it was the segment that goes from the inside of the house to the grounding block outside.

Read on for all of the gruesome details…
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