My Ubuntu 64-bit 9.04 upgrade did not go very smoothly, it left my machine un-bootable. The upgrade downloaded all of the packages, but seemed unable to install anything. The detail window was full of the same message, something about a dpkg failure. I was really bumming, as the upgrade on my 32-bit laptop worked flawlessly. I hoped that I could recover my blog, but was not exactly sure how it would workout. I tried using chroot after booting from the CD, but the install messed up the file system so badly, nothing would run.
I found an old 40GB Quantum Fireball drive in the basement and did a clean install. You have to give the Ubuntu team credit (even though I was pretty mad about my upgrade problem); the install was really quick and everything was auto configured after the install. I was super happy! The clean install actually fixed my NVIDIA driver issue; one of the 8.xx patches toasted my video settings about a month ago. I lost my advanced desktop effects, screen savers, and Avant Window Manager (dock). This actually ticked me off too, I hate when things don’t work like they are supposed too! One thing that was really surprised me was how slow that old IDE drive was verses the new SATA technology. I have to get that drive out of my box, ASAP!
It was pretty easy to recover MySQL and WordPress. I never took the time to figure out how to backup MySQL, so I was a little worried about losing my blog data; I guess that will now be my number one priority. The restore was as simple as copying all of the files from /var/lib/mysql and /var/www from my old drive to the new drive. I just had to change the file owners and groups, restart MySQL, and my blog was back, up and running. Not too bad!
Not that it would have helped, but my trusty NAS storage seems to have bit the dust last week; great timing! I have been using a Buffalo Technology LinkStation for several years as my off-site backup, it is out in the barn! It has always worked perfectly, other than a noisy fan, which has been fixed in the new models.
I’m going to stop locally hosting my blog and sign up with bluehost. I think this will fix several issues for me; I won’t have to run my computer 24×7, upgrades won’t be such a risk, and maybe using them as an off-site backup. I also plan to move my wife’s web site, she has an interior design business, over to bluehost as well; then I can setup a real site for her, rather than some simple web pages.
