OS Upgrades

Carrying out upgrades to the OS on server today. Maybe a little downtime but I am hoping the PL issues reported lately are resolved with the updated kernel.

While carrying out OS upgrades....I accidentally fucked up the server. I then ran into a few issues with the OS and I went on an ambitious venture....

After spending 5 hours trying to troubleshoot the issue, several people advised that the server was beyond repair. This mean the OS had to be reinstalled. I didn't want to pay the host and thought I'd use this as a learning curve....I found that the server was not partitioned correctly or as I'd like it to have been. This meant if I reinstalled the OS myself, a long shot with ONLY remote access through terminal/putty that all data would be lost. I backed everything up and thought to myself, I need a partition. Linux does not like the live working partition to be partitioned when it is being used. So, I unmounted the swap which was only 2gb and installed Ubuntu into it. This was a very manual install, I had to setup everything for the server, from processor recognition, network card etc etc etc.

Once I'd done this, I booted into the partition, all was good. Success after 6 hours of careful work making sure nothing broke. I had 498gb that I needed the system to recognise. I re-partitioned the rest of the drive 450 under /home 3gb for swap 5gb for /var and 5gb for /usr with the rest unpartitioned.

So 6am, final reboot before I restored all the data, webserver, gamservers etc. No sleep all night and 12 hours of continuous working with a distraction from cube and concentration lapse, I managed to screw things up. I forgot to tell Linux where the boot file was located, it was still using the old one which was on the bit that I had just partition. I didn't issue the update-grub command.

In the end, I ended paying the host to reinstall the OS anyway, huge shame because I felt like I achieved so much! I had people on IRC who were sceptical about my venture because, it rarely works and because there is so much manual configuration to do, people are rarely successful.

Valuable lessons learnt for the next time I need to reinstall the OS ;)

I feel so loved now >_<
Anyways nice to see its back up.