On my production web server, I’m kind of a crazy fool.  I often do things that make people cringe and scream and say “what the hell are you doing?”

One of those said things is doing a distribution upgrade on-the-fly of the OS.  Since the installation of my server some three and a half years ago, Debian has had two major releases.  My server started with sarge, upgraded to etch, then upgraded again to lenny.  Unfortunately this time after 1210 days without rebooting my server I was forced to reboot. That is to say, since I installed my server where it lives it had never been rebooted.

The reboot occurred because the new libc required kernel 2.6. I was still cooking with an old 2.4 kernel.  After a pile of apt-get trickery, I got the necessary packages installed and had to reboot.  Once the 2.6 kernel was up and running everything else installed without a hitch.  I had to track down a few configuration changes with a couple of things, but overall I think the upgrade went smooth and with only a few minutes of downtime.  Not bad, I say, not bad.

Well, this is one of those crazy fun things that I had to attempt. My old system drive consisted of two 80 GB IDE drives in a mirror configuration. Pretty standard, but they were getting sluggish and I happen to have a few 320GB SATA drives doing nothing.

This is not a tutorial. This is a step by step account of a process I took to replace my disks; This is to be taken only as a suggestion as your configuration and mileage may vary. There may also be a better way of doing this.

So, lo and behold, I plugged them in to my eSATA ports and started rolling over!  For the sake of this exercise the original drives will be sda, sdb. The new drives will be sdc and sdd. The raid device is md0. (more…)

I had the joy of recovering data from a busted-ass Windows XP installation.  You know, the one where it blue screens no matter what boot process you try with an error about “kernl32.dll” being screwed? Yeah, one of those.  So, I fired up an Ubuntu live CD to test the hardware and figure out if anything was actually wrong with the laptop – and much to my surprise – everything just worked.

I’ve watched Ubuntu grow over the years and I’ve used it on many machines.  The trickiest has always been cheap laptops.

The specs on this machine are fairly simplistic:

• Intel Pentium M 1.6Ghz
• 1255MB of ram (strange, eh?)
• 40 GB hard disk
• cheap-o-dell-branded cd-rw/dvd-rom (modular, though)
• broadcom gigabit ethernet
• intel wireless
• bluetooth (dell branded, onboard usb device)
• standard ac’97 modem, ac’97 audio
• and a bunch of other fluff.

I’m just really impressed that everything works.  I didn’t have to find any windows drivers, or do anything goofy to get things rolling.  All the function keys (standby, hybernate, wireless, battery status…) work as expected.

Kudos to Ubuntu.

Today, like clockwork, is the day in which Ubuntu issues another release.

Get your copy via the always legal BitTorrent here.

Happy Ubuntu Day!

Looks like I neglected her too much.