Misc

People have been wondering why my server has been going up and down since Christmas morning. It hasn't been hacked or anything along those lines. I do want to thank everyone who was worried about that and offering temporary space/hosting until I got things resolved. This is not really how I wanted to spend my Christmas, but I figured it was the best time for maintenance. My server will probably be up and down a few more times this week until I finally finish everything (hopefully by the end of the week).

Updated 1/17/2007: Holy S*%$#, I just got a call that they are still working on it!

Updated 1/10/2007: This is taking them forever as its still in progress and my server is now a bit of a mess from it :/. All I need is the server installed with an OS. Can it really take them this long????

I have been running Red Hat 9 for quite some time now and decided it was finally time to upgrade it to a more recent Fedora release. The biggest reason for this was when I tried to build PHP 5.2 on it. The XSL extension now requires a 1.1.x version (the 1.1.x versions have been out for a couple of years) - yet my installed version was of the 1.0.x line. On the other hand, I have kept the libxml2 libraries up to date. I figured it was time to bring them both up to the latest versions, so went about to build some rpms - just to keep things in synch. Come to find out the newer libxml2 needs a newer version of python than what I had installed on my server. I really didnt want to build libxml2 and libxslt without python support and trying to update python and all the rpm dependencies was going to be a real nightmare, so I figured an OS upgrade would get me up to date with everything more easily (and this is where things got fun).

This is a remote dedicated server so I all I had was my handle terminal window and the yum command line tool. I found some great reference material on upgrading from older RH releases to recent Fedora releases. One worth mentioning can be found here (be sure to read everything including notes about a specific upgrade before attempting). It was pretty straight forward and worked other than an issue which I spent a few days tracking down.

Trying to speed things up a bit I upgraded from RH 9 directly to Fedora Core 2. The instructions for the Core 3 upgrade seemed a bit longer so I was going to do that as a small incremental from 2=>3. Upgrade went very smooth and quick, with a successful reboot showing me the nice Fedora Core 2 indicator. The one thing I hadn't done yet was to boot into the new kernel. The server was still running the 2.4.25 kernel and not the 2.6.10 one from the FC2 upgrade. I have done a number of upgrades from RH to FC including a test run on a different machine going from RH9 to FC2 using yum and encountered no problems. I never imagine I would run into a problem and blindly set lilo to boot into the 2.6.10 kernel as its default and rebooted.
BIG MISTAKE: I will never blindly set a default kernel again without at least a test boot into it.

I recently had a computer here crap out on me. Rather than wasting time trying to figure out what piece of hardware was the actual culprit, I took the easy route and just swapped out my old computer (just built a snazzy new Core 2 Duo system) with the old one. My wife wanted to keep all her old programs, data, settings, etc... so I just installed her old hard drive into the other system. After a few reboots to get all the different hardware working under Windows XP, everything seemed to be working fine (other than some issue with the USB only wanting to operate in 1.1 mode instead of 2.0 - but I digress), other than having to re-activate XP (doing this one would assume would resolve any type of issues of hardware migration, but noooo....That would be too easy). We listen to a lot of music so the last thing I made sure was working was her Rhapsody and its syncing with her portable player. Things didn't go too smoothly here....

Upon starting up the Rhapsody player, I was presented with this nice message about corrupt licenses with a link to the MS help system. At this point I figured things shouldn't be too bad. I knew I was going to have some issue after replacing all the hardware and I was conveniently lead to a help file on how to resolve the issue. Of course it couldn't be this easy. After being lead through a maze of hot fixes (it was required that they all be applied to resolve this issue), I finally rebooted the computer and went to check on the fruits of my labor (I am now 2 hours into dealing with the DRM issue alone). I tried to install the last hotfix and get a nice error message telling me that the components I have installed are not compatible with this last fix. 2 hours of my time wasted following THEIR directions and it didn't even come close to working. I was no closer than when I started. I had enough at this time and stormed off for a while.