Completely Broken (Now Fixed)
I managed to break nearly everything yesterday. If you didn’t notice any of it, take a moment to metaphorically pat me on the back for my keen Unix skills and responsiveness.
In an effort to keep all the userland programs on Bactroid.net more up to date, I dug into using portupgrade and its brethren. After a quick listing of my ports showed that over thirty of them were out-of-date, I typed and executed a command that would download, compile, and install every out-of-date program on my system along with every out-of-date dependency for each of those programs.
When the churning finally stopped, almost every system was malfunctioning. The web server was pointing at the wrong data. PHP just wasn’t working. Secure SMTP was non-existent. MySQL was so badly broken that even a complete reinstall didn’t help. I launched in immediately and started fixing things, but I didn’t actually completely sort things out until about seven this morning. I brought visible and critical systems up first, so the impact to people was pretty small if logs are to be believed.
The advantage to all of this madness is that I should now automatically grab the latest ports tree via CVS and send myself a report showing which programs have a source update available. That email will spawn appropriate GTD projects for the week, leading to a consistently up-to-date server with relatively little consistent effort on my part.
Technorati Tags: Bactroid.net