When you log slow queries or queries without indexes in MySQL, you should regularly rotate the file to save disk space. Quite some suggestions on the internet involve complex scripts which do this, other suggestions discuss FreeBSD's log rotator newsyslog. However, most of the descriptions about newsyslog appeared wrong to me, because no PID file was specified for the rule. This means that a SIGHUP is sent to the syslog daemon instead of the mysqld process, which is undesired.

In the daily status mails I found the following lines:

I tried to upgrade ZendFramework from 1.5.2 to ZendFramework 1.7.0. At that time, version 1.7.5 was already released, but I wanted 1.7.0 no matter what. However, when trying to do so with the clumsy portdowngrade and then portupgrade, the following error appeared:

At some point, it was impossible for remote clients to connect to the MySQL server. The client (some application on a Windows platform) gave a vague description like Connection unexpectedly terminated. When remotely logging in with the MySQL client the following error appeared:

In order to limit the connections made from a certain IP address, one needs to patch tcpserver, the process which receives all incoming connections and passes them through to QMail. These steps describe how to patch tcpserver on a FreeBSD system, where the QMail SMTP and POP servers are executed with the supervise (svc) daemon.

At a certain point, ClamAV 0.93 was not running anymore and complained with the following message as soon as you tried to start it:

It appears that the quickest solution is to update ClamAV to 0.93.3 or higher. However, compiling ClamAV 0.93.3 on a FreeBSD 6.1 machine (or earlier) causes the following error:

Running a FreeBSD 6.x guest on an ESX server may cause the following lines on the console:

This renders the system pretty unusable. The shape of the lnc driver is not that good (hence it has been deprecated from FreeBSD 7 and replaced by the le driver). Fortunately, VMWare ESX offers another network interface which works better in combination with FreeBSD. To switch network interface, follow these steps:

1. Open the VMWare Infrastructure Client.
2. Shut down the FreeBSD guest.

The FreeBSD manual about ipmon(8) has flaw which is a bit annoying. This post is just a quick reminder for me in order to report it, so that it can be fixed.

The man page of ipmon(8) describes the fields which are printed in its output. One of these fields has the following texts:

chkuser is a patch for QMail 1.03 which checks if the recipient address is a valid user on the system. If not, it will block the mail right away. This is nice, because usually this is checked after scanning a mail for virusses and spam. Now this is checked beforehand, which saves you a lot of CPU cycles.

This entry is quite simple: don't use SMP FreeBSD kernels on a VMWare virtual machine. This gives many problems, illustrated with this snippet from dmesg: