I run my servers under Ubuntu (and I already hear the hard-core nerds out there saying, "Why don't you use RandomDistro Linux?". To them I say, "Because I don't want to spend even more time ministering to my system than I already do.") and was still running Breezy.

Since I upgraded from Hoary a few months ago, my Spamassassin system had not been working, so I spent most of Saturday getting that cleaned up. And, since I had already gotten my spam act back together, I thought that this would be a good time to get ClamAV filtering going, too. I had downloaded the package many months earlier, but hadn't gotten around to integrating it into my procmail system. To do this more easily, I wanted to use the Clamassassin Perl script. This is where my trouble began...

I downloaded the source package and tried to compile it. Sadly, as I had never compiled a custom package on this machine, when I typed make install, the system happily told me that it didn't know what the heck make was. I went to download make and found that the Breezy repositories were no longer there (So that's why I had no updates for so long! So that was what all of the error messages telling me the repositories were missing was about! The clueless one is suddenly enlightened...). At that point, I made the decision to update to Dapper.

Sunday, the downloading of the packages and the upgrade itself went fairly smoothly. The two main issues? Shorewall (excuse, me - Shoreline) and Dovecot. In between the release of Breezy and Dapper, both of these packages changed their configuration files radically. Needless to say, they changed them so radically that I had to rewrite them (or, as we say, life sucks). In any case, after I finally got these programs working, I was able to download make and get Clamassassin running. Of course, I could have stopped at this point...

But of course, I didn't. Instead, I decided that Monday night, I was going to upgrade to Edgy and, on Tuesday night, upgrade to Feisty. I figured that doing that would ensure my being up to date for a few more months and allow me another year or two where I wouldn't need to worry about updates. So Tuesday evening, I started the upgrade to Edgy... Again, the switching of the repository went fine, as did the upgrade itself. But when I booted the machine - nothing. OK, a little bit of something - it showed the startup screen and froze. I restarted in recovery mode, found a couple of error messages and Googled on my other computer to find out what went wrong. Essentially, Edgy had tried to update my /boot/grub/menus.lst and /etc/fstab to use UUIDs instead of device names. And, of course, it had gotten the UUIDs wrong. I edited the boot menu entry back to its original form and after a few panicked moments when I thought my entire disc had been lost somehow, I was able to reboot, bring up nano, and edit the fstab file. After rebooting again, all was well. Having that under my belt, I started to download the packages I would need to upgrade to Feisty and went to bed.

I had planned to do this final upgrade Tuesday evening, but I had a few spare moments at work, so I logged in with SSH and started the upgrade. Happily, everything went fine and, after a reboot, all was sanity again...

The morals of this story? First, system administration never gets any easier. It always has been, is, and will remain a painful experience. However, in these days of various and sundry malware, anyone who owns a computer (and especially a server) has the responsibility to do his or her best to keep it maintained and secured. Next, system upgrades on Linux often break. In general, they do a fairly good job, but the application upgrades would have gone more smoothly on a Windows system (of course, I'd have to pay for upgraded software, but...). Try not to get too much out of date. If I had done this in three steps as the new versions of Ubuntu had come out, I would not have had three days of panic in a row. Whether or not three separate days of panic spread out would have been better is, for better or worse, a subjective experience. Finally, none of this should be taken as a slam against Ubuntu or Linux. I still think that Linux is one of the most transparent systems out there and, of all the distributions, Ubuntu seems to offer the best tradeoff between flexibility and ease of use. And having upgraded with various Red Hat derivatives, I don't think it would have gone more easily with any of the other distributions.

So, in honor of getting my server up to date, I am launching my Big Blog o'Irritability. You can access it either through the ancar.org web page, or link to it directly. Tell your enemies. I have had the software around for a while, but never got around to exposing it to the public. I now consider myself exposed...

I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoy writing it. See you around.
Posted 21:51: permanent link

However, being charitable, I simply place my order and drive on.

While deftly swimming between the Scylla of "How may I help you?" and the Charybdis of "May I take your order?", it is clear that the order taker at this dining establishment has spawned a new phrase. Sadly, his creativity is wasted on someone like me who views common English usage as usually sufficient.

Now, I would never want to steal from the users of our language their creative outlets - the minting of new phrases must create the currency of every living language. But in order to be a beneficial addition to the language, I believe four tests must be passed.

First, the usage must actually be new. English tends to recycle words at a breakneck pace, especially on the outskirts of respectable usage. A word or phrase that is simply recycled from past use, though its meaning might be useful and clever for the day, is simply reused. Our erstwhile order taker's verbiage is definitely novel and so passes this first test.

Second, the saying must be useful. Here, our server's words again fare well, the sayings replaced being highly useful for his job.

Next, the neologism must be unambiguous, either as it stands alone or in context. Again, my desire to make a sarcastic riposte seems to indicate that ambiguity arises from the new phrase. Am I to instruct him on how to place my order? Am I to go in and perform his job for him, sparing myself the trauma of both broken speaker and English? In either case, the ambiguity between what is spoken and what is meant seems to indicate that it flunks this test.

Lastly and (at least to me) most importantly, the phrase must be an improvement on what is available in the language already; and this phrase, most assuredly, is not, as either of the phrases so artfully merged by our speaker seem to do the job much better than his melange.

So, in closing, it's fairly clear that this phrase should not be a candidate for linguistic canonization just yet, as it fails two of my four requirements. And so my request, dear order taker, is this: Please stop. You sound like an idiot and it's getting pretty fucking annoying.
Posted 21:50: permanent link