Why Doing Upgrades While Gaming is a Bad Thing

Argh, I hate it when I do this. I was playing some BF2142, my latest current gaming addiction and decided that I needed something to do while waiting in between dying and coming back to life. I figured I’d make sure that the UFies box was all up to date, so I did an update and then selectively did an upgrade of a few non-essential packages, rsync, a couple of perl packages, etc.
What I didn’t see of course was that some random dependency of one of those packages was mysql, the main database that drives the UFies.org site, the TDIClub forums, and a few others. When I noticed that it had done this I went “oops”, ok, easy enough, I’ll just downgrade (while the old version is still running) and restart it and no one will be the wiser. Well, apparently in the time that I hadn’t upgraded it the lowest version available in my Linux distro of choice, Gentoo had gone from 4.1.14 to 4.1.21. OK, shouldn’t be a big deal right.
Recompile, wait, wait, wait…
Ok, done recompiling, restart and…. nothing. Errors in the error log tell me something about the default character set was wrong. Eeek. Ok, calm, relaxed…. why the hell did I do this at 10:30 at night!
First thing, back up the database, ugh, 8 gigs is a lot of data, but let it copy anyway, bogging the system down.
Found a page which describes the same problem with a simple solution (in theory), just recompile with the “latin1” USE flag and restart. Makes sense, that tells mysql not to use utf8 characters, which means that the default encoding for the database should be right in the current data, which means I should be able to just recompile and restart (again).
Waiting for the recompile now, the database copy finally finished, which let the CPU load off the system enough that the compile could go off with decent speed. Wow, done already too…. I love this hardware. OK, recompiled, now restart and…..
IT’S BACK!
Whew
In theory now I can upgrade to MySQL 5 without incident. Yea, maybe Christmas eve, just before I leave for a party…
Ok, maybe not. It is nice to know what the solution to the problem anyway. I’m still not 100% better and being up till midnight or 1am (hell, it’s already 11:30 now) would not have been fun. I would have if needed of course, as this is my responsibility and I have to fullfill my part of the “you deal with the system, I provide the hardware” agreement I have with my (hopefully) very understanding friend Fred 🙂
Heartbeat approaching normal….. time to go to bed.