Category: Geekery

Wish me luck

I’ve decided it’s time to upgrade my home server from Fedora Core 5 to Fedora Core 7. I tried upgrading from the DVD, and for some reason it was complaining about a lack of partition table on /dev/sda and /dev/sdc. It appears that it was mapping my current /dev/hdg as /dev/sda, and my current /dev/hda as /dev/sdb. That’s a result of libata, but I’m baffled why it mapped hdg before hda, and why that caused the upgrade to abort.

So anyway, I’ve decided to try another “upgrade by yum”. I didn’t want to do that, because ever since the last “upgrade by yum”, I haven’t been able to get X working – I figured a DVD upgrade would fix up any missing stuff.

I had to remove a couple of packages (up2date, rhnlib, pflog-summ, etc) to make the “yum upgrade” stop complaining about dependencies. Currently it’s installing package 802 out of 1297.

Can’t wait to see how hard it will be to fix the various problems to do with libata.

Pining for the fiords

After letting it cool down for a while, I managed to boot the computer. The internal backup drive was pretty hosed, so I had to mkfs.ext3 it and I’m doing a full backup again. Pretty soon I’d like to upgrade the machine to Fedora Core 7. I’ve got the DVD burned, so maybe I’ll give it a try tomorrow.

My home server is dying, possibly dead

Some months ago, the first virtual console on my home Linux box became “stuck” and wouldn’t respond. It wasn’t too much of an inconvenience so I didn’t bother much about it. A couple of days ago, I noticed that neither the CD drive nor the DVD burner was responding. Ok, I figured, I’ll have to schedule a reboot to fix that. Then last night’s backup failed when internal drive that my rack mount server backs up to suddenly decided it was read-only. I unmounted it, remounted it and it was ok. I restarted the backup and everything appeared to be running fine. But then a few hours later I noticed the CPU was pegged and two rsync processes were going crazy. Evidently the backup is screwing up again. I killed the backup, and decided I reboot it again as soon as I got home.

I was reluctant to take this step for a couple of reasons – first, it has 159 days of uptime. Second, it has always been a bitch to reboot. In the old days, it just wouldn’t recognize all the drives every time. Putting in a really really powerful power supply mostly cured that problem, but now it shows the BIOS screen showing all the disks, but then it just sits there not going any further. I can usually fix it with the reset button or power cycle.

I got home and found my office door had been closed, and so it was baking hot in the room with my computer. And when I rebooted, it wouldn’t come up. I’ve tried many of my old tricks, and it’s still not booting. I’m going to let it cool down, but if that doesn’t work, I guess I’ll be shopping for another server. Problem is, I don’t *need* a new server. The current one has plenty of processing power, memory, and most importantly, lots of disk space. I suppose I’d like something that’s more energy efficient, but otherwise I don’t know what to shop for in these days.

WTF? Apache crashed.

It appears that my Apache server on my colo box died early this morning at 6:26, which is around log rotate time. The only anomaly in the logs is that it appeared to have problems killing one of the FastCGI processes, sending it SIGTERM twice and then SIGKILL. This has never happened before, and it’s somewhat annoying. Fortunately I was only off the air for two hours or so.