So when I had ‘rented’ (yes, rented, I don’t own the box this site sits on, I mearly lease it…) this server I ran apt-get upgrade to take care of updating several items on the server and I could have sworn that I masked out the kernel packages. Apparently, i didn’t and apt removed the kernel images and stuff needed to boot. Yar. Not good.

As would happen, I had to reboot and the box would not come back up. My wonderful host looked at it and told me what was wrong, offered to copy my data to a slave drive and reinstall the system from scratch. You would have thought that since this server was up for less than a month, this would be a freebie, but no, they wanted me to pony up $69 for this wonderful service. Mind you, they couldn’t get a kernel on there to get the system booted again to what it once was.

Me, being remarkably resourceful, and knowing a thing or two about admining a debian install (three years as tech support for a web hosting company I figured I could do what they couldn’t, so I had them boot it with a live cd and give me an ip address I could access the box from.

So armed with the ip address, the root password they created and knowledge of google and apt-get I logged on to the box on Saturday morning and ran a simple command:

apt-get install kernel-image-2.6.18-i386

and with in less than ten minutes the kernel had been replaced and I was ready for them to reboot the box minus the cdrom.

Mind you, it must have worked because you’re reading this today… and I still have my $69.

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