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Fri, 13 Apr 2007
WOOOO HOOOO!!!!! posted 19:03 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Mon, 09 Apr 2007 On debian and downtime There was a voice inside my head though, speaking softly to me, as I went about upgrading my trusty sarge box to debain etch. The voice was warning me to go slow, to be sure to read the release notes, to make sure i had all the bases covered, the i's dotted and the t's crossed. I mostly ignored the voice. I was aware of the pitfalls (or at least I was aware that there could be pitfalls), but another louder voice in my head said, "just do it, woody to sarge went so smoothly, what could go wrong?" I knew better, but I did it anyway. First a little background info: this box used to be a desktop, and later became a server. It used to have a monitor and keyboard. Now it's a headless sun box in a corner of my youngest daughter's room. The reat of my computers are in other parts of the house. I do all my administration on this box via ssh. Beofre i stared the installation I did a trial run; i changed my sources.list file to call for etch repos instead of sarge and did the whole update upgrade thing-but stopping short of selecting yes and letting dpkg make the changes. I saw that a great many packages, that I have long since stopped using were going to be upgraded. So I changed my sources.list file back to sarge repos, and went about uninstalling any and everything X-windows related. As I mentioned before this box is a true headless server now, I don't need all that GUI stuff anyway. After cleaning up the GUI packeges that I didn't need anymore, I stared the upgrade proper this time, and was pleased to see the number of files to be upgraded was significantly less than before. The upgrade itself went as I expected--perfect. Maybe too perfect. There were some tense moments though. The one foremost on my mind, was will the upgrade finish, before my wife wakes up and comes in and tells me that I have to be at work in 5 hours and need to get my butt in bed. The other thing I was concerned about was apache 1.3 vs 2. My server is still running apache 1.3 and I don't want to move to apache 2 yet. I sat there watching the text scroll by occasionally checking the time, and listening for my wife to wake up. I noticed that apache 2 was installed along side apache 1.3 and apache 2 took over web server and replaced my web page with a page that said "It works!". That was easily fixed though, by uninstalling apache 2. My box was upgraded, my site was only down 10 minutes (due to apache 2 taking over momentarily), and the wife didn't wake up and fuss at me, and I was in bed before 12:30 am. Life was good! I woke up the next morning feeling great! My very old Ultra Sparc 2 box had new life. This is what is good about linux and debian. I got to work and ssh'd into my box and poked around some; it was then I noticed that the upgrade didn't upgrade my kernel from 2.6.8-3 to 2.6.18-4. "That won't do", the voice in my head said. What i did next was stupid. I have been using linux for 13 years, what I did was dumber than dumb. I upgraded the kernel, and removed the working kernel after I was done. I did this 40 miles from home, and then I rebooted my machine! Did I say that what i did was dumb? What happened next was 10 hours of downtime for my website, for my blog, for my forums, and my podcast rss feeds. That, and a lot of fussing at myself. Was i really so stupid, or was it because I was feeling good (read smug) about myself and the upgrade the night before? Or was it because I was at work, and in a hurry? I have to think it was a little of all of those things. One thing i do know though, thus was my fault NOT debian's. I knew better, and did it anyway. On the drive home, I hoped against hope that I hadn't done what I knew hat I had. I kept telling myself, maybe just maybe, you did a shutdown -h instead of a -r. When I got home my fears were realized. The sparc was running, but linux wasn't. Luckily, I did still have a 2.4 kernel on the system and was able to boot into that, and determine that the reason the box didn't boot was that the new 2.6.18-4 kernel and/or udev didn't recognize my hard drive or my cd. Uninstalling the 2.6.18-4 kernel and reinstalling the 2.6.8-3 kernel fixed the problem. The server is up and running etch. Life is good again. I said earlier that this was my fault, not debian's. Either the new kernel or udev is buggy, at least on my hardware., but I have no one to blame but myself for rebooting a new kernel on a production machine from 40 miles away. Live and re-learn. posted 22:05 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Wed, 16 Aug 2006 HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEBIAN! posted 00:05 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Tue, 18 Jul 2006 Debain Etch on Sparc, keeping my fingers crossed This looks good! There is an ubuntu sparc distro now, but I'd rather run debian on my sparc server. posted 20:18 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Sat, 04 Feb 2006 Way-cool linux site posted 12:11 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Mon, 23 Jan 2006 Rolling your own Debian packages posted 00:22 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Wed, 08 Jun 2005 without a doubt posted 09:52 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link Mon, 06 Jun 2005 Finally!!!! posted 16:24 [/computers/linux/distros/debian] permanent link
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