…at least for a while.

Another round of system updates to my Linux server and another round of things that broke. I soon managed to fix most of these, but some others went undetected for a while. Once pointed out, however, they too got corrected. (After I spent a little while wondering how in the world to do that.)

One issue was a “library” file that was replaced by a newer piece of the system, but which some other pieces relied on. I had to back everything out, get the older file, back it up, upgrade to the newer, then restore the old one so that I had both versions at the same time. (Despite what some of the software installation routines think to be the case.)

Another issue was some faulty installation routines in my mail software. I had to make some manual corrections to some linkages that weren’t done automatically. (Specifically, the latest postfix RPM didn’t rename the binary from the latest sendmail RPM and put the appropriate link in place to its own version.)

Lastly, I spent some time fighting with the upgrade procedures for phpBB 2.0.6, the discussion software that’s used by Ask Virgil. It turned out that the only way to get it to work was to have the upgrade script files in two different places at the same time. Before I stumbled onto this I either got error messages with no other result, or the server simply crashed. Of course this was never explicity mentioned in the documentation or anywhere else…