Category: Revelation

So far so good

The upgrade went as well as can be expected.

The libata business didn’t cause too much trouble. Most of the entries in /etc/fstab used labels rather than device names, so I only had to fix the entries for the swap space and the CD-ROM and DVD burner. I had to fix some entries in /etc/munin/plugins.

Postgres stubbornly refuses to upgrade as always, so I’m going to have to blow the data files away and restore from last night’s nightly backup.

The nightly backup ran twice for some reason, but that might be because I rebooted sometime around midnight. Unfortunately the two runs kind of stepped on each other so I’m running it again now.

NUT (the UPS tools) fails with some problem with a missing file.

I had to uninstall bind-utils for some reason, and now I can’t reinstall it because bind-libs is 9.4.1.-5.fc7 but bind-utils requires 9.4.1.-4.fc7. Hopefully somebody on the Fedora Project will fix that little stupidity. Oh what do you know, it’s fixed now.

Another yum dependency issue I was having last night with “yum groupupdate Base” also seems to have fixed itself this morning.

My Sun JDK rpm got uninstalled somehow.

I had to re-install rawdog (with “python setup.py install”).

I can’t understand why files that I never touch in the fonts area end up getting new identical copies as .rpmnew files. RPM should be smarter about that.

So, not too much to fix. And in return, X is working again, I’m not stuck on an obsolete version of Fedora, and maybe I’ll start getting updates again.

One of these days I’m hoping to move to something Debian based so these upgrades will be less painful.

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.

Last night’s paddle

Last night I went with the Hugger’s Ski Club for a group paddle. There were seven of us, and we went to what for me is unexplored territory, Braddock’s Bay in Hilton. It was a nice paddle. The stream was extremely placid, and for most of the way Rob and I were forging ahead into water without a ripple on it. Didn’t see too much wildlife, except a fair number of turtles, some large splashes that might have been carp or might have been muskrats, and the usual kingfishers and swallows, and one great blue heron who took off before we got too close. Several of the people in the group spent the entire time loudly chatting, so even though I was up ahead of them I think they scared off some of the wildlife.

As you can see from the linked map, it appears that there is more navigable stream above where we turned around, plus several other streams coming off other parts of the bay that might bear exploring.

A tall person on a low boat, or a low person on a tall boat?

I’ve gone paddling with Rob a few times, and he’s always remarking how low in the water my kayak seems. And I suppose it is – and not entirely because I’m a lard-ass because he’s not too much lighter than me, and in a shorter boat, and his boat sits with gunwhale quite a bit higher than me. But my boat was made for speed, and to be something I would work towards mastery of; while his buying criteria were more in terms of ease of entry and exit, initial mastery, and lightness of craft.

That low-ness is made quite clear in this picture Rob took a few weeks ago at the Hugger’s Ski Club Paddle Power outing. I didn’t catch the name of the guy in front of me there, but it seems to me that I’m a tall man on a low boat while he’s sitting low in a tall boat.

Upon reading this post over, I’m struck by wondering if I would have written in quite this style if I hadn’t just finished listening to “Moby Dick” on my iPod.