Big fubar (& lessons learned)

Purdy on 2004-09-14T20:47:43

So I use PHP in some areas of our site (quick hacks or 3rd party stuff) and in order to put php4 on my Debian Woody system, I gotta go w/ a backport ... specifically this DotDeb guy. So this afternoon, I'm about to install Bugzilla and in some of the requirements, it prompted me to install some CPAN modules (btw, if ya didn't know ... Debian's got it's own way of installing Perl modules: dh-make-perl). So I thought, I should sync up w/ latest patches. So I did and the upgrade rm'd /usr/lib/apache/1.3/libphp4.so. I didn't notice until later when I restarted the Apache server. Panic ensues as I'm trying to figure out how to get the libapache-mod-php4 package re-installed. Finally works with 'apt-get install libapache-mod-php4', but that still has problems.

Anyway, I had to restore a backup of both libphp4.so and 500mod_php4.info and that seemed to work. But add to the mix my browser was caching stuff, so I sometimes didn't think it was working when it could have been working.

Man, that's a good cardio workout, to have your production server go down and it's your fault.

Ok, so lesson learned: don't upgrade your server software in the middle of the day. I know you're prolly like "D'uh!", but it's just so tempting sometimes to 'apt-get -qyu update/upgrade'... never has hurt me before. But now I have a vicious scar and have learned my lesson.

Peace,

Jason