vaguelyaware.com

everyone keeps asking me about what happened. so here it is…

i was about to run some updates on my server, the one that hosts this site and some others, which upon reconfiguration, i realized i had more than i thought. anyway… adding maybe an email server, configuration panel, DNS server, all sorts of nice little things. then i realized that my apt sources.list still referenced the ’stable’ version of debian (the OS) which is now ’sarge’ so i put it back to ‘woody’ the version i was running and tried fixing what had already gone in. the screenshot below was the beginning of the end. i obviously said ‘n’ i don’t want you to continue. and it did anyway. i few keystrokes later i removed everything, even the ssh server i use to access the computer. all in all, i hosed it.

so i gave gavba a ring, the guy that has access to the datacenter, and is amazingly knowledgeable when it comes to linux stuff - once he got a chance to login to it (as i no longer had access) he re-installed, well everything important AND upgraded me to sarge (the new version of debian linux).

most amazingly, there was no server restart, uptime at a surprising 78 days, no hiccups at all so far. i put apache, mysql, modphp, and all those goodies i need back in, and rebuilt my httpd.conf file, everything was working again. i guess from working with windows server so much, i was expecting a LOT more problems.

well that was fun.

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