There is apparently no such thing as an easy upgrade. This weekend’s project was to upgrade my server from RedHat 9 to Fedora Core 3. That’s not supposed to be difficult. But of course with my luck with computers, it was more than just difficult, it’s been a long and frustrating experience, and it’s nowhere near over.
The upgrade seemed to go ok, but for some reason after I booted it I was getting tons of errors from the /mp3 partition on /dev/hdc. Over and over again, I was getting stuff like
hdc: dma timer_expiry: dma status == 0x21
hdc: DMA timeout error
hdc: dma timeout error: status=0xd0 {Busy}
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
hdc: DMA disabled
ide1: reset: success
hdc: irq timeout: status-0x80 { Busy }
ide: failed opcode was: unknown
ide: reset: success
ReiserFS: warning: is_tree_node: node level 19789 does not match to
the expected one 1
Plus every time I rebooted, fsck found more and more errors on my main partitions, which were also formatted with Reiserfs. I figured that there must be a problem with Reiserfs and the 2.6 kernel, because it seems unlikely that my hardware suddenly failed when I decided to upgrade.
So I tried just doing a “mke2fs -j” on all the partitions, and then restoring from the backups. But when I tried to boot, I was getting some error about attempting to seek beyond the boundaries of a partition or something.
All this trial and error took most of Saturday.
So I gave up, and just tried a full install. That went fine, except for two things:
- I’ve spent most of today restoring various bits and pieces of services – fortunately I made a checklist of services that I support first. I’m about 75% done.
- I don’t have a decent backup of /mp3s, since it’s too big to back up.
Anyhoo, anybody who uses my services should note that the following things are now working:
- spam filtering
- mailman
- ssh (although my host key changed, so you’ll have to delete your xcski.com line from your .ssh/known_hosts)
- ftp
- web service
- blogs
- picture gallery
- DNS
As well, I have news working, although I lost my existing news spool to a corrupt backup. Oh, and I can’t get GD.pm to install.
At this point, I’ll probably just open up the nntp port on my firewall again and go to bed.
Good night.