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.
Continue reading “Getting there…”
Category: Geekery
I hate dynamic IP
My ip changed again. This is happening more and more often, and it’s starting to piss me off. The only way to get a static IP from my ISP (RoadRunner) is to sign up as a business customer, which costs about 3 times as much with no other change in service level.
Wish me luck…
Ok, I’ve got my Fedora Core 3 CDs and I’ve studied my blog entries from the last time I did an upgrade, and I’ve made a checklist of everything that I can remember that I do with the box. It looks like this weekend is upgrade time.
Ok, 1, 2, 3, “By all means, Paul, fuck with the hard drives”
Software patents are evil, and I have one!
United States Patent: 6,812,994
6 named inventors. My boss, his boss, the head of the whole department, the guy from Corporate Design and Usability who we had to fight with over the gui design, the other coder who did the main shell of the gui, and me, the guy who did all the fun stuff – database design and implementation, custom widgets, support programs, etc.
I feel both proud and unclean.
What I’m wasting my day on today…
This happens on RedHat 7.3 – haven’t tried on something more recent.
Assume you have a machine where root can rsh to localhost (yeah, I know, but the machine isn’t on a network where there are any users, so it’s not as bad as it could be.)
rsh localhost "/etc/init.d/snmpd restart; echo 'DONE'"
will echo the “DONE” but never return unless you hit ^C twice.
rsh localhost "/etc/init.d/snmpd restart
works as expected.
Now take a script that does rsh'es to a bunch of machines and runs apt-get on them (as well as on the local machine) and does various configuration tasks on both the local and the other systems, including restarting services. See script run. Now, take the entire script, and
put a
{
} 2>&1 | tee -a /var/log/upgrade.log
around the whole thing, and suddenly it never finishes.
See Paul waste his whole day trying different variations, each time requiring 45 minutes to put all the machines back to the version 3.3 configuration, and at least 20 minutes for the script to run. Can you say “bored and frustrated”, ladies and gentlemen?
And to top it all off, there’s an AIRMET for icing all along the route to Ottawa, so I won’t be flying after all.