Even though the server was running fine, I thought I'd twist myself up and try an in-place upgrade of the OS to the new version. Alas, as expected, it isn't going well.

First, the newer kernel images in the boot menu (normally hidden at boot time, but I had to activate it to make it work) don't boot. At first it was throwing an IRQ exception. I fixed that by booting to an earlier version and doing a little tweaking. Updates later, and now it just hangs. Booting to an earlier kernel gets the server up, but to what ails?

After getting the older kernel booting, a slew of error messages and warnings fly by. Sure, some may be just normal notifications I don't normally see (as I seldom boot the server, and even less frequently watch it boot), but it seems like there are too many libsasl version messages...ldconfig must have horked somewhere.

Then, now that it's finally running, I can't get the mail server running. Seems they replaced sendmail with Postfix. Well, I knew that, but I didn't know that it the case that the Postfix install would interfere with my sendmail install. Sure, sendmail's a bit more complicated, but if you get it, that complication isn't so bad. That complication provides a lot of functionality, especially since the server's handling a bunch of virtual domains. Plus, I've already got it configured, so let me just use my own freaking mail server...sheesh.

Resigning myself to accept the forced configuration, I set about to try to move the configuration to the new Postfix MTA. However, it's complaining with "/usr/local/lib/libsasl2.so.2: no version information available (required by /usr/sbin/postconf)" at every turn. Similar to the other slew of messages. I fixed this after a little Google searching, but still the mail servers won't start (either Postfix or sendmail).

For now, the rest of the server seems to be running. That this blog software is working shows that my installation of Apache is still working, with PHP underneath, and it's talking to my MySQL server, too. Other checks show that I can check e-mail as the Dovecot IMAP/POP3 server is running fine. Also, the Java installation is good, as the Tomcat servers are running.

This weekend I'll spend some hours copying the data from the server to a safe place, noting the installed software and trying to save off all of their configuration and data files, and start a clean installation. Something so I can get the mail server running...either one of them.