Well, that upgrade seems to have been completed OK with a couple of issues: I had a couple of glitches one of which was to do with the rails backup of my database – fixed by turning off the backup stage in the rails installer. There was also an issue with my tags: I’ve known that my tags caused problems in the past with my use of the full stop. In the new typo it causes major problems so I wrote a quick script to replace full stops with underscores. Hopefully all is well now!
There is a new version of Typo out which I have been holding off upgrading to after the last upgrade mess. There have been no problems reported on the mailing list though, so it’s time to upgrade.
Fingers crossed…
[08:40] Well, that was quick and easy. Much less fraught than last time!
After a couple of days of pain toblog is back, and it wasn’t the typo upgrade that caused the problem.
A few months ago gentoo removed a patch to their postgresql build. Unfortunately the removal of this patch caused a problem which meant that pretty much any query on the structure of the database returned:
ERROR: did not find ‘}’ at end of input node
This is not good.
I found someone who suggested some database surgery online but this only partly solved the problem. So, having partially updated typo because the upgrade requires structural queries to work, I finally took the plunge and did what was ultimately necessary.
- Alert clients to a database / mail outage overnight
- Stop the database
- Take a backup of the data directory
- Downgrade postgresql to the version with the pg-heir patch
- Startup postgresql and undo the surgery performed above
- Dump all the databases to file using pg_dump -Fc
- Stop postgresql
- Upgrade postgresql
- Remove the old data directory
- Reinitialise the postgres database
- Start postgresql
- Create the required users
- Create the required databases
- Import all the databases from the files dumped above
This took a good couple of hours, and pg_restore does take a lot longer than pg_dump. That said I now have a properly set up postgresql install that I am happy with and understand a lot more so some good has come from this exercise.
Bring on the 8.2.x upgrade!
Typo 4.1 release
… there ‘might’ be some downtime here soon
