TV, booze, and system upgrades

[annathepiper]

So, tonight made some progress on de-stressing me. spazzkat being kind enough to spot me a six-pack of Mike's Hard Berry on the way home did quite a bit to help this. So did having a treadmill walk with my GBS 1 treadmill playlist--the one with all the Very Best GBS tracks from Rant and Roar and up. And there was Firefly waiting for me on the Tivo, so having me an hour of Captain Mal was very easy on the eyes.

Then mamishka came over, wearing a very cute Japanese-style black and white top, and bringing me two fluffy romances to borrow as well as three of my own books I'd loaned her some time ago. And we watched Battlestar Galactica, and lo, it was The Good. It was our mutual consensus that BSG this season is almost too intense to actually 'enjoy'--you almost more 'survive' it. We spent a lot of time during this episode exclaiming variations on "oh MAN" and "oh SHIT" and "Oh god, I see where this is going now".


While all this was going on, I started chugging back the Mike's (because alcohol is EXACTLY what you want when you're doing system upgrades, bwahahahahahaha ahem er, well maybe not but I didn't care) and working on upgrading door and then newmoon to Debian 3.1. Door's upgrade went relatively quickly and painlessly, and I only had a couple of questions asked me about this, that, and the other config file it wanted to know about. I told it to keep all the important ones (like named.conf). Door seems happy now. We are, at least, still on the Net and have DNS and stuff. So.

Newmoon's upgrade was not quite so quick and painless. The damned process nuked a lot of the packages we had installed, so we had to go back and reinstall them. This was quite annoying especially for solarbird, who had to figure out how to fix the ways that sendmail installed itself badly. We also had to reinstall apache on the system, and Spamassasin, and Dara's mail program of choice (that being, well, 'mail'), and I had to fix a little tweak that got lost with Mailman when sendmail got uninstalled. And we had to reinstall qpopper too. But on the good side, at least, I installed Nethack. AND Slashem. Because I have my priorities in order.

I don't think I'm even going to try to tackle lodestone tonight. I do have to wonder, too, if there's some sort of command-line argument I might have missed with apt-get update/apt-get dist-upgrade that I could have used to tell it "NO, dammit, do not uninstall the extra packages we added to the system, kthxbye". Debian geeks out there, is there such a beast?


And now, a cautionary tale about what happens when you're awake too long trying to upgrade your servers, as it was seen upon the MurkMUSH:

Solarbird BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS
Thanatos doesn't have any.
Solarbird BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS GODDAMMIT
Solarbird sends openly ** SCOTTY WE'VE GOT TO HAVE BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS IN
  FIFTEEN MINUTES OR WE'RE ALL DEAD! **
Anna .oO (Zombie Dara = Kirk?)
Solarbird ew
Solarbird sends openly ** BUT CAPTAIN I DONNA CARE I'M ALREADY DEAD! **
Solarbird sends openly ** Zombie Doctor McCoy says, "Hell, so're half the rest
  of us. It's turning into quite the party down here!" **
Thanatos says "It's worse than that."
Solarbird sends openly ** I'M DEAD JIM DEAD JIM DEAD JIM DEAD JIM **
You say "Scotty, beam me up!"
Solarbird sends openly ** ZOMBIE SCOTTY CANNA DO IT! **
Thanatos says "You're all fired. Go home."
Zombie Spock says, "Fascinating." Oddly, he looks little different than Living
  Spock, except maybe a little greener.
Solarbird sends openly ** ZOMBIE SCOTTY SINGS, 'MY BRAINS ARE ON THE STARBOARD
  BOW, STARBOARD BOW, STARBOARD BOW, MY BRAINS ARE ON THE STARBOARD BOW,
  MMMMMMMMMM BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAINS **
You say "SCRAPE 'EM OFF, JIM!"
Solarbird sends openly ** LICK 'EM OFF, JIM! **
Anna EEEEEW
Solarbird sends openly ** THEY'VE DONE BEEN FREEZE DRIED! **
Anna giggles helplessly
You say "HI we're very tired! Does it show?"
Thanatos says "Only when I look."

And oh yeah:

Friday evening miles: 1.40
Adjustment from last weekend because of miscalculated distance to Kenmore Post Office: 0.5
Miles out of Hobbiton: 268.55
Miles to Rivendell: 189.45

Comments

[fleetfootmike.livejournal.com]

"NO, dammit, do not uninstall the extra packages we added to the system, kthxbye". Debian geeks out there, is there such a beast?

Depends on how you installed them, really. Apt-get is usually RIGHT about uninstalling things if their dependencies are in some way b0rked.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

Good point....

Take the third-party URL's out of sources.lst and run apt-get update, then capture the output of apt-show-versions. The ones that say "unavailable"? preserve their configurations. Heck, just make a copy of /etc/ in /home. Then do the rest of the changes to sources.lst, go ahead and run apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, and reinstall the stuff that broke, which should be easy since you've got a list and the preserved configs. It's not automagical... but it's less difficult than figuring it out.

I can probably be available next Sunday if you want...

[annathepiper]

The only third-party packages I've been installing were things off of backports.org--in which category neither sendmail nor apache qualified. However, Mike's point about possible broken dependencies may be applicable. I seem to recollect having to fight with apt-get to make it install sendmail when it was bitching at me about the sendmail package conflicting with exim being on the system.

I don't think there's anything to figure out still on newmoon--Dara and I hit the critical things we needed to get back up and running, which were the web server on newmoon (which I need for the Mailman mailing lists), sendmail, and spamassassin. We'll see what happens when I hit lodestone. :)

[annathepiper]

That sounds... not improbable. I seem to recollect having dependency fights trying to get apache and sendmail installed on newmoon before.

[starsongky.livejournal.com]

Only one thing I didn't like about tonight's BSG - no Starbuck.

Oh, and the text in this comment box is a ghosted-out pale grey small print. Either that, or I'm just getting cross-eyed the longer this shift wears on.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

You do have a contrast problem here... it's not as bad as it could be, but the text stuff really should be all black and not grey.... hard on the ol' peepers.

[annathepiper]

It's a thing about the style I'm using, not something I did myself. But I daresay I can go digging into the style code, find the thing in charge of setting the color of this comment, and bump that up to something darker. :)

[annathepiper]

It's not you--it's an artifact of the style I'm using. I'll find where it sets the color of the text of these comment boxes, and bump that up to black.