Please??? Please?

Please? Here, have some video…

Despite the fact that I’m not a big fan of his… Wil Wheaton actually has a decent post about some good linux resources out there. Recently, he tried linux out again and his findings this time were pretty good… though, I will say, he was using the current Linux Golden Boy, Ubuntu.

Got any more good linux resources for beginners? Let us know.

So I did something on a live production server (the web server here at work) the other day that I probably shouldn’t have done…. I ran yum update with out masking anything out of the update and then I rebooted the server. Needless to say, I learned why there are certain things (kernel and kernel sources) that should be masked when getting ready to automatically update your server.

On reboot, the server nicely suffered a kernel panic because it couldn’t find root. This stems from my custom partitioning the drives and setting it up the way I know how (with out the logical volume manager). I do this for several reasons, but mostly because I like it that way. The problem is most modern kernels and distributions do not support this with their stock kernels and grub installs any more… grrrrr. So I rebooted the machine and at the grub prompt, I selected the older kernel. Which is fine, we don’t need the bells and whistles of the 2.16.20 kernel (we’re on 2.16.18 or something…)

To counter this, installers such as yum, portage (emerge), apt-get, swaret… have ways to mask or protect certain packages from being upgraded. It does strike me kind of odd, that Fedora 6 doesn’t seem to by default…

Before upgrading world on your boxen, make sure to mask out any mission critical packages that could potentially ruin you if they’re done wrong…