I figured it was about time for this Gentoo powered blog to enjoy the security and performance enhancements provided by TLSv1.3. However, that meant leaving “Gentoo stable” behind and travel on a journey of discovery into the land of the unmasked and dangerous.

So why is this release noteworthy? Well, I experienced an issue with the previous release (Tor 0.3.4.7) where I was unable to get sandboxing to work due to the following error:

Gentoo developers recently marked mod_security-2.9.1 and modsecurity-crs 3.0.2 as stable on amd64, thus allowing me to move on from the dormant ModSecurity 2.7.7 release. Good thing I got this update on a Sunday though as it turned out to be more than a simple drop in replacement.

PHP 7.2 just went stable on amd64 providing me with an opportunity to finally migrate away from PHP 7.0. Unlike the PHP 7.1 releases, PHP 7.2 offers significant performance improvements.

After a long rebuild session yesterday due to the Python 3.6 upgrade, I was not overly impressed when issuing emerge --sync eventually resulted in a proposition to revert yesterdays work:

Python 3.6 recently replaced Python 3.5 in the default Python targets on Gentoo systems. The change was announced a month ago, which provided more than enough time for me to forget all about it. Because of this, I was somewhat surprised today as Portage complained about unmet requirements for the fail2ban-0.9.6 ebuild.

While configuring my first Gentoo VPS I somehow managed to crash a service and discovered that I had actually no idea how to recover it. The service no longer had any matching processes but it still refused to stop, and simultaneously insisted it was already started. Severely embarrassed I made sure nobody was looking and rebooted the server.

I recently added support for the HTTP/2 protocol on this server and I am really pleased with the additional performance gains. This VPS was already running a functional LAMP stack, so the following steps describe the necessary configuration changes for my setup which relies on Apache with PHP-FPM.

Now that I’ve been running this blog on Gentoo Linux for a while, I’ve discovered a few new potential gotchas when failing to pay attention while interacting with Portage. The latest addition to my list was nearly removing my running PHP installation with emerge --depclean.