My initial plan was to make a backup of the root disk and blaze ahead with an aptitude-based upgrade. Soon I realized, though, that the kernel was too old (2.4.x) to migrate directly to etch. I would first have to upgrade the kernel under sarge, and that's where the fun began.
After half a pot of coffee, the urge to ensure my nightly backups had worked were pushed aside and I decided to just go ahead and install a new kernel image package. What could go wrong? Worst case scenario I could just boot back to the 2.4 kernel and try again after researching the problem. It turns out there is something dreadfully wrong with the way this old box boots from disk with 2.6.x kernels and I was quickly stuck in "rescue disk" land with a big mess on my hands. The 2.6 upgrade had flipped some modprobe/initrd stuff and I was faced with either:
- trying to figure out how to undo the 2.6 kernel image installation and make 2.4 work again
- trying to figure out why 2.6 made the box cyclically reboot after uncompressing the kernel
- putting this old dog down and moving everything to my much more capable "dev" box
Luckily I rsync'd my root disk to my Ubuntu box prior to the 2.6 installation, so I was able to shift main webserver duties to that box. That was my intention at some point anyway, so my cavalier upgrade this weekend just hastened that process. I don't expect any data loss, just have to spend some time rebuilding mySQL databases and fixing ancient cgis and PHP scripts to work on Apache2 and whatever else is different with Feisty Fawn.
And that old 600 MHz Cyrix III board and all its accoutrements are headed directly for the recycling bin!
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