It was a bit painful due to a bad decision on my part and a flaky dist-upgrade from Ubuntu, but if you’re reading this you’ve noticed Metamusing is back. The bad decision led to the extended downtime. We got Charter out to install cable on Friday last week while Susan and I were off from work and unpacking. I tried to bring the server back online that night, and when I brought it up it alerted me that there was a new version of Ubuntu out and asked if I wanted to upgrade. Without really thinking I said sure, and let it start its thing (a dist-upgrade can take quite a while), then moved on to other chores in the house. Some hours later I checked back in with the machine and the dist-ugrade had hard locked the machine, or possibly just killed the usb bus, but either way I could no longer interact with the machine, which was sitting there with an alert that had popped up part way through the upgrade warning me that some packages I was running were no longer supported. Tired already and frustrated, I cycled the power.

Bad choice, which I basically knew when I was making it. This rendered the machine unbootable. With so much else on my plate I turned my attention to other tasks and only returned to it last night. Thanks to a pointer from someone at work the repair was relatively painless. Recovery mode ftw 😉