A distribution upgrade failed on mail.eskimo.com leaving the machine in an unbootable state where grub failed to install properly.

     An attempt to install grub2 manually results in can not write EFI variables to NvRAM.  I’ve not encountered this on a virtual machine before and not being successful at finding info on how to fix.  The easiest thing may be to just rebuild the virtual machine from scratch and then restore all the files.  I have a few other things I’m going to try first but before I do I’m making a current backup of the mail spool to make sure we do not lose any mail.  This may take several hours.

     An upgrade of the mail server mail.eskimo.com is in progress.

     There may be temporary periods where the server does not respond during this process.  It should be brief.

     Finally got the web server upgraded.  Don’t really know what went wrong last night, pretty much repeated the same procedure but this time after I had finished the compile environment still worked so I was able to recompile apache2 and have it use the newer openssl 3.0.2.

     So all of eskimo.com including friendica.eskimo.com, hubzilla.eskimo.com, and nextcloud.eskimo.com, and all the hosted websites are now running under Ubuntu 22.04.

     I wish to wish all of you who are Mother’s a very happy Mother’s day!

     My mother has been gone from this planet for about a decade now.  She was the wisest woman I’ve ever known in my life.  Lived a hard life but threw her best effort at it.  She is with the Lord now I am sure, she was a good woman.

     Today I also tested negative for Covid so in spite of being 63, diabetic, with high blood pressure and overweight it didn’t succeed in killing me!  Well now I have natural immunity without having had a clot-shot.  I know there are still people who believe in that thing but I would suggest strongly you avail yourself to some of the 75,000 pages of data Pfiezer was forced to release.  Strangely, I have had some folks be angry at me for not taking the clot-shot but I’ve not endangered anyone as I completely self-isolated for the duration of the disease.

     And on a final note, I will be taking the web server down again tonight for a while making one more attempt to upgrade.  I actually had it working briefly under 22.04 last night but with the wrong version of openssl, and trying to correct that resulted in a chain reaction of deleted software owing to new dependencies in 22.04 that are going to require some work-arounds, so I had to revert to the previous backup.

     End of life for the OS on the web server happens this July so push is coming close to shove.  After that there are no security updates and the web server is perhaps the most exposed server in terms of the total number of services it makes available to exploit so it is of particular importance to keep current.

     This will affect all web sites hosted under Eskimo North shared hosting plans as well as https://friendica.eskimo.com, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://www.eskimo.com.

     The plan is tonight to get it into the same state where it is on 22.04 but still running the old openssl, then write backups, then work on correcting that which unfortunately is going to also require fixing much of my build environment which upgrading to 22.04 also broke.

     I was unsuccessful at upgrading the web server last night but learned some more things and am going to make another stab tonight but before I start I am going to take it down for about 1/2 hour to make a backup as there was an upgrade to hubzilla today that I don’t want to accidentally back out.

     Then with respect to covid, Tina and Raymond, my wife and son who is still living with us, tested negative last night so they are getting over it.  I still tested positive but the line on the test was very weak.  And last night was the first night I’ve been able to sleep without intestinal and stomach pain in over a week and the congestion is down substantially so while I’m not totally over it I’m doing much better.

     I am going to make another attempt at updating the distro on the web server, if it fails there will be about a half-hour downtime to restore from backup, if it succeeds only a few minutes to reboot.

     Past attempts have failed because of library version mis-matches, I believe I’ve got a way to identify and fix the offending libraries.

     This will impact https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, https://www.eskimo.com/, and all the shared hosting sites we host.

     Now that I’ve removed a number of unused PPAs, removed “Proposed” packages, and hopefully gotten the web server better prepared for a distribution update, I am going to take the server down for approximately an hour between 10pm-11pm tonight to make another image backup prior to another distribution upgrade attempt.

     This will affect https://friendica.eskimo.com/, https://hubzilla.eskimo.com/, https://nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and https://www.eskimo.com/ as well as any shared hosting customers during this interval.

     Ubuntu has successfully been upgraded to Jammy Jellyfish 22.04 LTS.

     Microsoft Visual Studio Code is no longer installed.  If you were using this please let me know and I will re-install.