More bullet-points from the field of battle:

• First I had to add shell info to each of the user accounts before FTP would work. Then I had to tell ProFTPd where it could go stick its notion of defaulting to a chroot home directory login for all users. On account of this, RDS info for many of our stations’ websites was nonexistent until midday. Argh.
• The default Apache config file in Fedora Core 3 is set not to run CGI scripts. Um, what? (This broke Mari’s and Dawn’s sites. Argh.)
• The upgrade to a newer version of PHP somehow managed to leave our comments script mysteriously broken. Luckily someone posted a simple and effective fix on the dotcomments support group. Whew. I’d never have figured that one out on my own.
• While trying to solve the previous mystery, I discovered that ‘jhead’ was missing on the server. This is a JPEG header information program that Gallery uses… and we have Gallery installed a few times on this server, donchaknow.

I’m sure there’ll be more. There’s no way I can be allowed to get more than three consecutive hours of sleep, after all…

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…