" A mighty cry of "Oh fuck" did rise from the bowels of the tower ... the beast did poop mightily upon the carpet, and I was called upon to clean up and teach it a lesson"
-John the Unstable
I decided to install a webmail program on universe, in order to check my mail
from anywhere in the known universe. (and to support certain users for when they fly
out of the country). Unfortunatly, 4.6's ports collection was rather old, and
the version of php didnt support what I wanted. So, I figured I'd just upgrade
the system. It worked out ok the last time I did it, so I figured no problem.
It was chugging along merrily when All of a sudden I heard the tape drive re-set.
That was not supposed to happen. I dashed to the console (I had stupidly
started the upgrade via a ssh connection), only to find that horror of horrors,
it had rebooted. It got worse. I failed to boot. Panic ensued, and I spent the
rest of that night performing an upgrade the hard way. That was the first bout.
I then discovered that I had somehow installed Apache 2, which is not cleared
for production use yet, and that gallery and php and a shed load of other stuff
was now broken horribly. Removing that broke phpcompletely and a host of other
things, earning myself a full blown reload. That was not terribly bad, except
for one thing:
The tape backup didnt work.
Fortuantly, before I re-started the upgrade the hard way, I took the precaution of making an emergency backup to the drive mirror. That saved my ass, even though that file was corrupt as well. A week old dodgy backup beats no backup whatsoever.
I'll make a long story short. the gallery was down for roughly a week until I got it working again. (and in a manner which allows others to use it besides me.) I still don't have a webmail program running, as it appears that most of them require an imap server, which I can't seem to get running without breaking pop3 access.
I need a drink. Badly.
Lessons Learned this time: