Thu, 26 Jul 2007

Latest geek insanity

So, my latest tail of woe…

I was going to swap the “real” server (which is finally configured and running well) back into production. But I’m doing a bit of contract work and have a proof of concept database application set up now for the client to look at. Well, the client hasn’t gotten around to it. So rather than break the demonstration (by swapping out the servers), I decided to upgrade my workstation to Fedora 7.

I figured: it’s just my workstation, no network services running on it that I need to worry about, no shared data, no public stuff so it will only impact me. And since it’s the most recent of the machines I’m updating, I thought it would be the least likely to suffer problems.

Well, it seems (so far) to have but one problem — the network card refused to work. It booted up with the network card active and seeing traffic (this is weird now…) but without an address. I could give it an address, which still would not work properly. Then it would hang so bad when I tried to stop the network or restart it that I couldn’t even restart the workstation with resorting to the power button. It would shutdown all the way to stopping networking and just hang (and at that point in shutdown I don’t believe I have access to a working console).

(Oh it had one other problem, really slow boot complaining about “ata 2.01: Failed to set xfermode.” I found a reference to that via Google and fixed it with irqpoll on the kernel line in grub.conf.)

So, back to my non-networking. In the process of getting irqpoll to fix my hard disk / slow boot issue, I got into a non-bootable state — have to be careful of syntax in grub.conf. I was able to boot from the rescue disk and fix my conf file mistake. I also noticed in passing that networking seemed to work in rescue mode. So on a lark I booted from the rescue disk, chrooted to my installed, almost working Fedora 7 install (courtesy of the rescue disk setting that up for me), and tried a yum check-update. It did not complain about how I’d booted, and it found all the new packages, so I decided to update on the off chance that would get it working.

It did — I’m amazed actually. But happy (at the moment). I’ll put back my personal files tomorrow and see if I can mount my second disk, but I don’t expect to have too many troubles with either of those tasks.

So quick recap: I have 3 boxes I wanted to replace but couldn’t justify the cost of new hardware. I have one upgraded with a current OS and working fine (knock wood) as our internal server. I have a temporary stand-in upgraded and working fine (knock wood) as our public server. I have the public server ready (I think) to swap back into place after being upgraded. And I have my workstation upgraded and just need my files restored to it.

I believe I can see the light at the end of the tunnel now. I thought it would be a two week job, it’s been 12 weeks (and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel but likely have 2 more days to go).

Whatever will I do next????

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