Last weekend I was trying to upgrade my server from Ubuntu Jaunty to Karmic Koala. I followed a tutorial found on Google and the installation actually went quite smoothly. In the last step the installation process told me the upgrade was completed and asked me to reboot the server. However, I waited minutes, hours and eventually days after the reboot, but the server never came back online. This server host all of my blogs as well as my subversion server for the project I am currently working on that was migrated from BitBucket.org.
I fired support ticket to my host provider and they spent around 2-3 days and eventually told me that there was some package installed by mistake during the upgrade and they could not recover my server. The only option I had was to re-install the whole OS and start from scratch.
Oh dear, what a shame. Luckily I have backed up all my blog database, images and project files. All I need to do was to spend sometime to re-install latest Ubuntu server again and reloaded all my blogs and subversion server.
In the last few days I have been setting my “new” server up and now is back online with newest up-to-date Ubuntu server and re-loaded WordPress with my blog database. Subversion is up and running again as well.
From now on, I really need to keep my server up-to-date as often as possible. The real issue from last week was that I could not simply upgrade the server to latest version because the version running on my server was too old and not supported anymore. The tutorial showed me a way to force the upgrade and turned out to be a disaster.
Well, lesson learnt and it is time to move on. I will need to do more to on the “new” server to schedule regular backups, especially my blogs and the subversion server.
