I needed that like I needed a hole in my head

A few days ago the sysadmin at the National Capital Freenet emails me to ask if the news system relies on any files in the /, /usr or /var partitions, because he wants to upgrade to the latest and greatest Solaris and doesn’t want to blow anything of mine away. I said no, I don’t think so. Ok, he tells me, I’ll be doing that on Thursday.

Ok, first I didn’t see any sort of announcement, either on the announcement newsgroup (which nobody but me EVER uses any more) or the main web site (which I hardly ever use, but I checked it for this).

Second, I get an email today saying “Ok, I’ve done the upgrade but something’s not working right because the news server doesn’t seem to be starting up. Oh, and by the way, I changed the hostname.” In case you missed that, yes, he said “Oh, and by the way, I changed the hostname.”

So I’ve send most of my time from about 5:00pm to now (10:20) fixing all the problems that his little upgrade caused.

• Because the version of Perl changed, I had to “make clean; configure; make; make install” the server software so the perl filtering worked.
• And dammit if that didn’t replace all the configuration files with default versions, so I had to find all the *.OLD files and move them back to where they belonged
• Our nnrpd authentication uses a custom program that lived on a NFS mounted directory full of local utilities. He decided that he didn’t want it mounted on the news server any more, so in the hours between me discovering this little fact and him responding to my email and copying the file over, I had to compile a work-around program that did less authentication.
• Oh, and since he renamed the system, I had to figure out how to bind the outgoing news connections to the other network interface, the one that still has one of the names that we use. (Note to self, innfeed.conf parameter “bindaddress”)
• I had to email all of our news peers to make sure they’re all using the “news.ncf.ca” address for us, not the older “freenet-news.carleton.ca” and “freenet9.carleton.ca” address which are going away.
• I had to test posts as a local news administrator, as a regular NCF user, and as a remote user. I had to make sure both outgoing and incoming feeds were working.

And that list looks a lot shorter than the time it actually took me.