I thought I was going to have a bad time upgrading my servers. I’d tried it once before and for some reason it decided not to come back to life. I think it hadn’t updated the grub list so it was trying to boot into a kernel that wasn’t there any more. Oops.

So I went into this latest upgrade with fear, dread and anticipation. Something would go wrong and I’d have to spend hours getting it back. I’ve been backing up one server to another for a long time now, so I knew I had backups (at least until midnight), but that wasn’t enough. I backed up everything again to a completely different PC and started the process.

The backup server was the first to be upgraded. It was already on Ubuntu’s Oneiric Ocelot, so it only needed to be upgraded once to get it on to Precise Pangoline (the Long Term Support version). Careful now. Log in as me. Run Screen. SU to root. do-release-upgrade -d (precise isn’t out yet, but it’s close enough to be stable). Something is bound to go wrong.

Wait for it. AHA! A trick question! /boot/grub/menu.lst is asking if I should keep my version or install the package maintainer version. My version has old kernels, theirs must have new kernels. THEIR’S PLEASE!

Reboot.

Hold tight.

Success! It’s back up!

Ok, now we have to do the same with the main server. If this one dies then I have to work really hard to get everything back (although it is on the backup server that is alive and kicking). Problem is, this time I have to upgrade from Natty Narwhal. That’s two cycles where things can go wrong. I started the first one. It finished in no time and asked to reboot. I was a little sceptical. I didn’t restart. I checked menu.lst and compared it to the kernels that were installed. They matched. OK, reboot.

ping supermatt.net.

Replies. That’s good.

ssh supermatt.net

Connection refused. Not good. It’s already been a minute or two since I rebooted. Could it have failed? Ssh again. Refused. Oh no, oh no.

http://www.supermatt.net

It’s running. I can see my sites! Let me ssh one last time… I’m in! I was just going to fast for it. One upgrade down, one to go.

This time, instead of being SSHed into the box, I used a little thing that bitfolk, my provider, supply. It’s called Xen Shell, which basically allows you to see what you would see if you had a physical monitor attached to the VPS. When it came to rebooting this time around, I could see the whole thing happen. I watched it go down, and then my connection was removed. Damn. I tried logging back in again to see if I could. I’m in. I can see it starting up. Login prompt. YES! It says 12.04! Ssh: fine! Http: fine! Excellent, three nail biting upgrades and absolutely nothing went wrong.

Now I’m happy in the knowledge I can upgrade my servers again with little fuss, but I don’t need to. Precise Pangolin, codename for Ubuntu 12.04 LTS is being supported for many years to come, so I don’t need to upgrade my distribution for at least two more years.

 

So here it is, that video of my talking about comics. Enjoy!

Last night was possibly the nerdiest night of my life. So far. I can get nerdier, I think, but so far this tops it all.

It was a couple of months ago, when I was in Mega City Comics in Camden, that I was approached by two strange, hoodied men. I should have listened to my desire to flee, but it looks like my flight or fight instinct made the wrong choice.

The guys introduced themselves as being from a nice little website which runs a video podcast about comics and they were simply interested in interviewing everyone there that day, asking what they thought about comics, which are their favourites, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary, nothing I didn’t do when I was dressed as Robin at Kapow, and nothing I haven’t tried explaining to my Mum, hoping she’ll stop wishing for me to grow up.

Skip forward to a couple of weeks ago. Out of the blue, I received an email from one of the guys asking if I wanted to audition for the site. Turns out one of the founding members decided to leave and they desperately needed someone to fill in. I hopped, skipped and jumped along to meet Eli, and stand in front of the Camera for a few minutes for a screen test. Nothing much needed to be done. I was asked to pick a comic to review, and I was given a comic out of the blue to look at for a shot while and come up with something to say about that. Nice and easy.

Seems the screentest went well, as last night I was back in the Comic shop, camera on me and Eli, chatting about everything comic related. We discussed what I like and what he likes, talked about the crazy wizard, Alan Moore, talked about what’s new and what might be. It was great fun! Of course, you’ll discover more on Sunday (hopefully) when the video is uploaded.

I may not be asked back to do more episodes, but I wouldn’t mind, I had great fun doing what I did last night and I’m very happy to have had the opportunity.