Doh!

I am *so* screwed… I ran the [portupgrade][] utility on one of our [FreeBSD][] servers at work. This was a production system that we used for printing certificates for our students, preparing address labels for [USPS][] shipments, and several other small (but crucial!) database applications. When I realized that the upgrade had roached all these business-critical apps, I tried to restore the system and found that my backups weren’t usable. ARRRRGH! From now on, I’m going to verify my backups by generating a [“table of contents”](http://books.google.com/books?id=uRW8V9QOL7YC&pg=PA743&lpg=PA743&dq=unix+dump+toc+table+of+contents&source=web&ots=TB8oB5ktlk&sig=0SlDKSsRNUtmIPeyG0DJ7Bv64FY) from the backup media *after* the backup is complete.

[portupgrade]: http://wiki.freebsd.org/portupgrade
[FreeBSD]: http://www.freebsd.org/about.html
[USPS]: http://www.usps.com/

for ($i=1; $i<=100; $i++) { print "$i. I will *never* run portupgrade(1) again without making sure I have a *known good* backup!\n"; }

About Jim Vanderveen

I'm a bit of a Renaissance man, with far too many hobbies for my free time! But more important than any hobby is my family. My proudest accomplishment has been raising some great kids! And somehow convincing my wife to put up with me since 1988. ;)
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2 Responses to Doh!

  1. Jim says:

    Well, after six straight days of working on this, I finally tracked down the issue. The LDAP extension got whacked by portupgrade. All I had to do was load the net/php5-ldap port and restart Apache:

    # portmaster net/php5-ldap
    (lots of output snipped)
    ===> Registering installation for php5-ldap-5.2.5_1
    ****************************************************************************

    The following line has been added to your /usr/local/etc/php/extensions.ini
    configuration file to automatically load the installed extension:

    extension=ldap.so

    ****************************************************************************
    ===> Cleaning for php5-ldap-5.2.5_1

    ===>>> Installation of net/php5-ldap (php5-ldap-5.2.5_1) complete
    # apachectl restart

    I’m almost positive that I tried rebuilding the net/php5-ldap module, but forgot to restart Apache when I tested it.

  2. Warboss says:

    Doh! Gilligan!!!!

    Just kidding, I know how easy it can be to overlook stuff (from my own personal experience). Just glad you got it up and going again! \o/ Yay! \o/

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