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Overcoming the Linux Upgrade Blues
Jun. 28th, 2000 11:30 pmWell, I've almost recovered fully from upgrading my Linux box last weekend. Besides not asking the kinds of questions one would expect to be asked during an upgrade (just a few, mind you, at the very least designed to see if one is awake, if not actually to expedite the process), the latest Mandrake distro -- a.k.a. 'Helium' or just 7.1 -- took a sweet eleven hours to finish the upgrade, making me happy that I decided to do the dirty deed overnight. The next morning, things took a turn for the worse once the process was complete.
For one thing, the upgrade automagically caused the box to boot into X Windows. As someone who likes the command line, I really didn't appreciate this touch, but a minor tweak to /etc/inittab fixed this annoyance, which paled in comparison to the main event: My mail stopped working.
What's the big deal? Well, I read a lot of mail, and that's after the spam is filtered out. Precious little of it is personal, but the three mailing lists and one newsgroup I subscribe to make up for it in volume.
(Remember personal snailmail? Those items that are neither bill, nor advertisement, nor government decree, nor solicitation, but something that someone you know stuck in the mail for delivery to your mailbox? I got one the other day. Tuesday, I think it was, but I digress...)
At any rate, the problem was worse than simply not getting mail. Since the upgrade had (as it turned out) stepped all over my mailer's configuration files, mail was being rejected (i.e., sent back to the sender with a "nobody like that over here" message). It took a few hours to figure out that the problem was actually, um, in progress :^), and then a couple of hours more to brush up on what the config should look like and test it to prevent even more mail from bouncing.
Other nice touches left by the upgrade: my desktop got rearranged (no great loss, but annoying), the Linux console no longer works (middlin' serious, but xterm is a workaround), and although I can still play music CDs on my box, I can't play any of my MP3 files or jack in the RealPlayer. A philosophical outlook helps; so does a copious supply of single-malt scotch.
Of course, I have nobody to blame for this state of affairs but my own humble servant of a self. I can only comfort myself with the thought that, were this my "bread-and-butter' system, I'd have Done the Right Thing and backed up the HD before risking an upgrade.
Yeah. Right.
Cheers...
For one thing, the upgrade automagically caused the box to boot into X Windows. As someone who likes the command line, I really didn't appreciate this touch, but a minor tweak to /etc/inittab fixed this annoyance, which paled in comparison to the main event: My mail stopped working.
What's the big deal? Well, I read a lot of mail, and that's after the spam is filtered out. Precious little of it is personal, but the three mailing lists and one newsgroup I subscribe to make up for it in volume.
(Remember personal snailmail? Those items that are neither bill, nor advertisement, nor government decree, nor solicitation, but something that someone you know stuck in the mail for delivery to your mailbox? I got one the other day. Tuesday, I think it was, but I digress...)
At any rate, the problem was worse than simply not getting mail. Since the upgrade had (as it turned out) stepped all over my mailer's configuration files, mail was being rejected (i.e., sent back to the sender with a "nobody like that over here" message). It took a few hours to figure out that the problem was actually, um, in progress :^), and then a couple of hours more to brush up on what the config should look like and test it to prevent even more mail from bouncing.
Other nice touches left by the upgrade: my desktop got rearranged (no great loss, but annoying), the Linux console no longer works (middlin' serious, but xterm is a workaround), and although I can still play music CDs on my box, I can't play any of my MP3 files or jack in the RealPlayer. A philosophical outlook helps; so does a copious supply of single-malt scotch.
Of course, I have nobody to blame for this state of affairs but my own humble servant of a self. I can only comfort myself with the thought that, were this my "bread-and-butter' system, I'd have Done the Right Thing and backed up the HD before risking an upgrade.
Yeah. Right.
Cheers...
