Pervasive Code

Pretty much every Unix user knows about the kill command, and most know about ‘kill -KILL’ aka ‘kill -9′.

But do you know about kill -STOP and kill -CONT?
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Argh! I spent about 5 hours yesterday troubleshooting a failed Ubuntu Jaunty -> Karmic (9.04->9.10) upgrade. It worked fine until I rebooted and then failed to boot. Here’s how I fixed it.
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Once again Ubuntu Linux proves itself to be easy to upgrade. Going from 9.04 to 9.10 (one release newer, since their numbering is bsaed on dates) was easy, but included the standard sprinkling of manual re-customization that I’ve come to expect from Debian based systems.
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I’m at WordCamp San Francisco today and decided that running a year old version of WordPress (on a year old version of Ubuntu Linux) was undesirable. So, with the confidence that comes from many relatively easy Ubuntu OS upgrades, I charged ahead. For (I think) the second time ever, things went badly. Here’s what I did and how I fixed it.
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Painless! I’m actually starting to expect it to work without hitches now.

There are a couple of config file changes that need babysitting but none of them was difficult; I really do wish it would automatically do a three way merge between its old package version, the new version, and my version, and just assume “yes” if they merge cleanly.

Instructions are trivial: see Hardy Upgrades: Network Upgrade for Ubuntu Servers (Recommended).

This also works fine on Xen.