Solved 14-RELEASE install weirdness

digifuzzy

digifuzzy

Installing a shiny new FreeBSD with the latest (14.0). The steps I follow for install are known to work with the 13.2-RELEASE. I ran into some oddball quirks during the 14.0 install process.

1) "disable_sendmail" appears to be missing from hardening in the installer. I have to dig for a reference on this one.
2) post-install and logging in, console produces a message saying the 14-RELEASE-p0 is nearing END-OF-LIFE and I should consider upgrading in the next two months. Yeah,...
3) using sh as a shell, brace expansion did not work.
Prior, I could issue the command mkdir /mnt/location/{x,a{b,c,d}} and directories "x", "ab", "ac", and "ad" would be created. Instead, in latest release, the shell ignores the expansion and creates only the single directory literally named "{x,a{b,c,d}}".

I could not find references to these observations in the errata or other forum posts. Item 2 could be associated with PR 273374.
 
digifuzzy said:
1) "disable_sendmail" appears to be missing from hardening in the installer. I have to dig for a reference on this one.
Click to expand...
because sendmail is no longer in base, as mentioned in the Release Notes:
The default mail transport agent (MTA) is now the Dragonfly Mail Agent (dma(8)) rather than sendmail(8). Configuration of the MTA is done via mailer.conf(5). sendmail(8) and its configuration remain available. a67b925ff3e5
Click to expand...

digifuzzy said:
2) post-install and logging in, console produces a message saying the 14-RELEASE-p0 is nearing END-OF-LIFE and I should consider upgrading in the next two months. Yeah,...
Click to expand...
there's an outstanding PR about that: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=275081

digifuzzy said:
3) using sh as a shell, brace expansion did not work.
Click to expand...
because the default root shell is now pure bourne shell, as mentioned in the Release Notes:
The default shell for the root user is now sh(1), which has many new features for interactive use. d410b585b6f0
Click to expand...

You *did* read the release notes, didn't you? Your points 1 + 3 are essentially the *first two* items in the list of userland changes...
 
sko - you mean the part in "Userland Configuration Changes" about a third of the way down the page just after the point where my eyes started to glaze over?

It's one thing to say "there is a change". Another to fully appreciate the impact.

Thanks for clearing that up.
 
digifuzzy said:
It's one thing to say "there is a change". Another to fully appreciate the impact.
Click to expand...
The FreeBSD release notes are IMHO what the golden standard for release notes should be: complete, thorough but concise and always linked to the resources one needs to get more information. So you should at least skim over the important parts (kernel and userland changes) to see if there are possibly breaking changes or impacts to your systems.

If I want to read useless BS like "lots of bugfixes and improvements" I can read the release notes of one of the "major browsers", where I have to wade through hundreds of bugreports to find out about some breaking changes or removal of functionality (which is then often advertised as a "new security feature" and never fixed).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top