Upgrades Can Cause Heart Palpitations
Note to self: pay more attention when running apt-get.
This is a little tale about how I can scare myself sometimes. I sshed into my server and ran apt-get upgrade. It spit out a goodly list of packages and I let it loose on them. Then I switched over to NetNewsWire and start reading the morning’s feeds. A little while passes and Mail starts jumping out of the Dock. That’s not a common occurrence, so I ⌘tab over and apparently my server’s rejecting my password (the fact that I’m running upgrades on it doesn’t occur to me). So I ⌘tab over to Safari and punch in scotfl.ca. Safari tells me it can’t connect to server. This is where I got worried because somebody has to be changing passwords and stopping services. So I ⌘tab over to Terminal to ssh into the server. And there’s my upgrade scrolling by. And I feel a strong wave of relief as I watch Courier and Apache get restarted. Switch back to Safari, hit ⌘R and… Wordpress give me a Db error. Back to the Terminal, scroll up, and, yep,MySQL is in the upgrade list as well. Three more minutes and everything is working fine again.
The moral: If you’re going to kill your three most important services during an upgrade, you should probably remember the upgrade is running.
(Yes, I realize this is a rather cavalier upgrade style, but the most important thing on the server is this blog (which is stretching the word ‘important’ somewhat), and I have a good back-up schedule so I can rollback the changes without much difficulty.)
