I just upgraded the main perl port on a FreeBSD box from 5.8.8 to 5.8.9 and a perl based service promptly died, complaining of problems locating dependencies. D’Oh!! That’s not good.
After a bit of crunching away I found that each perl module port (each p5-* port) needed a ‘make deinstall && make reinstall’ to align with the new perl version. The only bugger is that this machine has 54 p5-* ports installed. Now I’m basically lazy so I wanted a better way than manually reinstalling each port or even writiing a script to handle these specific ports.
Thankfully a little deeper google exercise turned up pearl-after-upgrade. From the man page:
The standard procedure after a perl port (either lang/perl5 or lang/perl5.8) upgrade is to basically reinstall all other packages that depend on perl. This is always a painful exercise. The perl-after-upgrade utility makes this process mostly unnecessary.
The tool goes through the list of installed packages, looks for those that depend on perl, moves files around, modifies shebang lines in those scripts in which it is necessary to do so, tries its best to adjust dynamically linked binaries that link with libperl.so in the old path, and updates the package database.
Brilliant!! Just what I was looking for.
I ran perl-after-upgrade followed by perl-after-upgrade -f, and it did all the heavy lifting of getting things straight. Just for good measure I ran a rebuild on mimedefang (portmaster mimedefang), and it was back off to the races for that system.
So I must say…. perl-after-upgrade is your friend!
FreeBSD, Is Your Friend
I am starting a new category of posts, called Is Your Friend. Frequently when talking with Todd Long (of the Jireh Consulting blog), one of us will find a cool tool or technology and inevitably it is said that <blank> is your friend.
Recently, Todd said that “OpenDNS is your friend.” I have to agree.
It seems that every few weeks or months another tool saves my bacon or another technology finds a home in my world. I will be filing these away under the Is Your Friend series.
Do you have a particular tool, program, gadget, widget, or whatnot that qualifies for Is Your Friend status? If so, let me know, and I’d be glad to include it here.
Is Your Friend
As I’ve been planning for my trip to Shmoocon, I’ve been thinking through what I will and won’t be taking along. I will also follow the advise I’ve heard time & again on podcasts about taking care at security conferences. As such, I’m planning to travel much lighter than usual. I will not be carrying my laptop. I will be taking:
- My phone – Bluetooth will be off, and the wifi never is on, so that’s good. If I have to connect, 3G and mail on the phone will be primary.
- EEEPC – I just got an Asus EEEPC 1000HA, and I’ve been impressed so far. I am considering loading an alternate OS or LiveCD image to an SD card and disabling my hard drive while I’m at Shmoocon. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m hoping I can disable the hard drive in the BIOS and boot from SD so that even if the system is compromised the hard disk would be out of play.
That’s it. Toss in a book and some clothes, and I’m ready to roll. Yee-haw.
Events
Someone from a school I work with pointed this out to me recently, and I want to make certain I can find it again in the near future.
Interactive Whiteboard with a Wiimote
The second point and second video on the page go over using the Nintendo Wii remote and an infrared pen to create interactive whiteboards or surfaces. I’ve been very impressed with the Wii as it was designed, but this kind of application is even more impressive.
I hope to give this a try in the future.
Other
In a month I will be in the middle of ShmooCon 2009 in Washington DC, probably freezing my Florida butt off. Cold or not, I’m looking forward to this opportunity. Two years ago I wanted to go but ended up out of the country. Last year I bought a ticket and ended up not going for other commitments. This year though, this year will be different. I’ve already booked the travel and I’m committed to getting there.
If all goes well, I hope to bring back my thoughts to share here.
Education, Events