Earlier this month a botnet found its way through the FreshPorts search page and kept the production database at 100% CPU. Over the following days I limited search to logged-in users, made a series of database changes, and on 17 October deployed a release with several search fixes. This post looks at what all that
FreshPorts October speed-up Read More »
This is not yet deployed and is still in test. When a date appears here, it has been deployed to production. Every port page on FreshPorts has a line reading People watching this port, also watch: followed by up to five links. Until now, that list was calculated every time the page was built. For
Precomputing “People watching this port, also watch” Read More »
This applies to upcoming webserver changes. When you see a date in this paragraph, it has been deployed. The search gate was meant to keep bots away from the search page while letting people in without a login. A botnet got past it, and the database ran at 100% CPU until search was restricted to
Deterring bots, but letting people in Read More »
These notes are for the next website release: 2.16.4 Earlier this week, the production database ran at 100% CPU. Turning off searches for visitors who are not logged in brought it down to 22%, and then to 10%. This post covers what was found, and the changes being deployed to fix it. What was found
Search improvements Read More »
The past thirteen days have been among the busiest in FreshPorts history: twenty-two pull requests merged, seven people contributing, and changes to almost every page on the site. Here are the highlights. FreshPorts speaks your language FreshPorts can now be translated (#678), and five translations are ready: Deutsch, by Stefan Eßer Français (Canada), by Marc
Thirteen busy days: FreshPorts now speaks your language, fits your phone, and more Read More »
freshports-www-2.16.1 requires some database changes. This post outlines the updates on one host. Since starting this post, there’s been a few updates, and now I’m deploying 2.16.2.6 This post was composed and amended over several upgrades. The inconsistencies you see in hostnames and prompts are related to that. Stop processing [14:59 stage-ingress01 dvl ~] %
Deploying freshports-www-2.16.1 Read More »
Yesterday, the logs started complaining about riscv64. Nothing was broken, but it was noisy, and noise hides the stuff that matters. I worked through this with Claude, which also helped me write this post. What I saw Every hour, FreshPorts checks pkg.freebsd.org for new package builds. At 13:00 UTC on 10 October 2026, this showed
riscv64 has packages, but only pkgbase Read More »
For my own notes later, when I wonder why this thing is readonly. This was generated by Claude. FreshPorts moved from Subversion to git on 5 October 2026. The Subversion repository it came from, freshports-1, should never change again, but the Subversion server also hosts other repositories which are still in use. So the server
How I set the old subversion repo to readonly Read More »
I have attempted this process twice before. My thanks to those who helped me. I never completed your work. I appreciate your assistance and apologize that I never completed my part. Tonight, I resorted to Claude for help. This is a summary. FreshPorts has kept its code in version control since its first commit on
Converting the last FreshPorts subversion repos to git Read More »
FreshPorts can now be translated. Over the past few days, nearly all of the website’s own text has been prepared for translation using gettext. That covers: This is not in production yet. www.freshports.org is still English only. You can preview the translations on test.freshports.org, and they’ll come to the main site after more testing and
FreshPorts now speaks more than English Read More »