February 24, 2025 10:02 PM
It's aliiiiive
So, I recently put my food blog up on github, and I decided to create a new repo for it. I had cleaned some stuff up, and I wanted to make sure all of the files I included in the new repo would work on the web server. But as I tried to re-install all the perl modules, it kept failing trying to install the sqlite driver for perl.
I still don't know why that was failing. I think it hit some sort of OOM while trying to compile some C code? But as I was digging through things, I noticed that my server had been running for over 1600 days, and it was running Debian 10, which stopped being supported in June 2024. As I mentioned in a previous entry, when something is really outdated, I know that I should probably update it.
I knew this would require some downtime for my sites because I would have to reboot the system, and I thought about doing this crazy thing where I redirected all my domains to a github io page that displayed a maintenance message. Then I read that DNS changes could take up to 48 hours to propagate (not to mention this is exactly the wrong way to go about maintenance), and I gave up on that idea.
Aaaand, just like my BIOS upgrade, I had to upgrade Debian twice, because I can't just jump directly from 10 to 12. So I used this incredibly detailed guide, and I didn't understand most of it, and when I was done upgrading to Debian 11, my sites stopped working 😬
I spent a few hours of googling and looking at various files on my computer before I gave up and decided to revert my box back to a backup that I had from last week. But then when I powered it on and started up my web apps, they still weren't working!
I suddenly realized that my firewall rules weren't configured correctly, and then I had this deja vu moment, and I remembered that I ran into this exact same issue years ago. Well, at least this time it only took me hours rather than days. I suppose I need to solve the same problem several times before it actually sticks.
So today, I had to redo the upgrade to Debian 11 (which went smoothly), and then I made sure the websites were still working, and then I upgraded to Debian 12 (which went a little less smoothly).
Okay, it actually wasn't too bad, and the only issue I ran into was that it kept telling me that "initramfs-tools" kept erroring. I had never even heard of this tool before, but it seemed important. I found a few different threads on reddit and stackoverflow questions that were mostly unhelpful, but I did find someone that hit the same exact issue three months ago! And it looks like they solved their own problem, so thanks internet stranger. I'm glad I didn't try this more than three months ago :P