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…)

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.

I installed Ubuntu 8.10, Alpha 6 on my Mac Book Pro  (2nd generation) last night to give it a whirl.  I didn’t do anything with bootcamp, just a straight install.  The installer was fine, it went it’s normal route.  When I rebooted it took a while – I guess this is expected when booting an alternate OS.

The fun started when I logged in. What appeared to be a fully working install – wasn’t.  The touchpad was slow and almost non responsive. I boosted the acceleration and  other settings, but to no avail.  It was unusable.

Audio worked, but not the audio out on the side. It didn’t switch over to optical output like it does with Leopard installed.

Dual monitors would only go into mirror mode. Even after I fiddled around with the settings I couldn’t get my desktop spanned across the second display.

It’s sad, but I had to go back to Leopard on the same night because I just don’t have the time to fool around with Ubuntu on my Mac to make it work the way I want it to.

Given that this is still only an Alpha release of Ubuntu I won’t count it out yet for being on my Mac.  Once the proper release comes out, I’ll give it another try.  But until then, Fail.