Computers

Debian Again

5 Comments

The “server” I built back in 2008 suffered a nasty accident at my own fair hands: a cack-handed attempt to patch the GHOST vulnerability, compounded by a previous, similarly cack-handed (though succesfull) approach to patching bash previously taught me a hard lesson in package managment on Debian-based Linux: Don’t fuck with the rules, and when you see a confirmation that says you must type

Yes, do as I say!

or the operation stops should be taken as n indicator it’s about to break. It did.

The handy bit was that the system stayed up, but I couldn’t start or stop services. This wasn’t going to survive a restart, so I got the data and config files off with SFTP, IMAP’d the email into a folder on mylaptop, and shut it down. Then work got in the way and I had to rely on gmail for a few days.

Rebuild was a bit fraught: Ubuntu Server no longer comes with a suitable kernel for the very old Celeron laptop i use as a low-power server, and I thought I’d have to use a desktop variant, but returning to Debian provided a install CD that worked, and after a few false starts with postfix config, it’s up and going again. The lesson learnt here is to be cautious (don’t break dependencies), but not too cautious (if I’d kept Ubuntu up to date, the 2008 build would have been upgraded by now, and \i wouldn’t have had to bodge the patches).

5 thoughts on “Debian Again”

  1. I hate rebuilds, as I rarely document what I have done,
    though I do now try and keep copies of config files

    got a rebuild / new build on the cards soon,
    replace Pi B with a Pi2 B, not sure if a apt-upgrade, will enable full support for 4 cores, so planning a ground zero,
    but at least I will have the luxury of parallel working

    1. I doubt an upgrade would see the extra cores. You could do it by installing the correct kernel manually, I’d imagine, and setting that to boot.

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