12:16 Sunday, August 08 2008

Fedora9, I loathe thee

I had to go into work yesterday (Saturday) to attend to some infrastructure upgrades. The plan was to upgrade the hardware & software for a bunch of systems to improve performance. One of the upgraded systems with the NFS fileserver that the developers use. It had Fedora7, and got upgraded to Fedora9, along with doubling the size of its RAID5 array to 2TB. Fedora9 bit me in the ass yet again. The actual OS upgrade went ok, thankfully, but I hit two problems afterwards. The first was when GRUB decided to stop working and needed to get reinstalled. That was relatively trivial, and more annoying than anything. The second problem is when the LDAP server decided to stop supplying complete user information. It would authenticate just fine, but then not associate the UID/GID with the username resulting in all ssh attempts failing. I spent over 2 hours Googling like mad for a solution, and when 7PM rolled around and I still was no closer to figuring out wtf was going on, I punted. I blew away the OpenLDAP installation, and then reinstalled from scratch, followed by restoring (slapadd) the previous night's ldif backup. 15 minutes of work, and everything was working again. I should have done that to begin with, but it irks me to have to throw in the towel rather than fixing the breakage.