So the next time I get a bright idea in my head to upgrade the webserver, remind me what a disaster this turned out to be. Please?

Let’s see how many things can go wrong in one server upgrade:

• Grub strangeness post-install, requiring use of the “rescue” mode of the install CD.
• An intensely frustrating experience trying to make networking work, solved hours later by the discovery that SMP kernels don’t like APM/ACPI on some motherboards. Oh, isn’t that nice. By the time I got this one figured out it was too late to catch a bus home.
• The VirtualHost directive in Apache 2.x is ever-so-slightly different from what it was in 1.3. Just enough to give me the better part of an hour’s frustration.
• When you’re already tired (and very hungry), trying to make Qmail work isn’t the easiest thing in the world. It doesn’t help when you’re a doofus who forgets to turn off Sendmail before firing up Qmail. Ouch.
• Courier-IMAP gave me similar headaches.
• I couldn’t figure out for the longest time where the ‘maildir’ script came from that I was using in my .qmail files. Oh, turns out it’s actually ‘safecat’. Duh?

And that’s just the stuff that takes me to, oh, right now. That would be 2:30 in the Ayy Emm, thank you very little.

Bah. I couldn’t get home now if I wanted to…