software

Did everyone enjoy the solar eclipse last month? We didn’t get totality here but my family up in Cleveland sent some amazing pictures. The daily temps are creeping above 80 which means spring in Florida and that of course leads to my annual spring sports update and Ubuntu upgrade!

• the Cleveland Guardians are currently 1st in the AL Central (and 2nd in the league), sitting at 22-12, a nice hot start for the season that I hope they can keep up!
• unlike last year, the Tampa Bay Rays have started a little slowly at 17-18, in the bottom half of the AL East
• for the second year in a row the Cleveland Cavaliers are playing in the NBA playoffs: they just won their Round One series against the Orlando Magic in 7 games and move on to face the Boston Celtics. That’s the first playoff series win for the Cavs without Lebron James since 1993!
• the NFL Draft happened the other week, but both the Browns and Bucs had decent seasons last year and didn’t have any high picks so I didn’t really pay any attention to it (but the Bucs did manage to sign Baker Mayfield to a new 3-year contract, so there’s that!)
• and the Lightning? *sigh* After making it into the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the 7th year in a row (and the 10th time in past 11 years), riding on Nikita Kucherov’s record-setting season with 100 assists and 144 points, they fell to the Florida Panthers in 5 games (the first time the Panthers have won a playoff series against the Lightning). I was at Game 4 here in Tampa when the Bolts won 6-3 … was I watching Steven Stamkos skate on home ice in a Lightning sweater for the last time? I hope not!! It’s going to be a tough off-season …

Anyway, Ubuntu 24.04 (Noble Numbat) was released late last month. Per the usual, I ran my pre-upgrade backup scripts and then sudo do-release-upgrade -d (once again needing the -d parameter otherwise no upgrade was found). It took the average 30 minutes to download and apply all the updated packages and then another 20 minutes or so for me to re-apply my affected changes to various config files. I ran into two problems this cycle:

• like with the 23.10 upgrade, PHP 8.2 was removed and replaced with PHP 8.3 and again the process removed the 8.2 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not re-install the corresponding 8.3 versions. This broke WordPress and my Piwigo photo gallery until I manually installed the two missing packages and restarted Apache. I take good notes during upgrades, though, so I was prepared to check on (and fix) this again.
• fail2ban “failed2start” (heh) with a ERROR No module named 'asynchat' error, but a quick Google search found the reported bug which pointed me to manually installing the latest 1.1.0 release, and that fixed the problem.

The latest 6.8 Linux kernel also fixed a problem I had just recently run into. I thought the latest release of Piwigo 14.4 had broken my Physical Photo Move extension (it was causing the Apache processes to completely lock up), but after digging into it more I tracked it down to a problem with a CIFS-related kernel patch in 6.5.0-28. I had since been running the reverted/patched 6.5.0-27 kernel from the PPA to fix this, but the problem was also resolved (or never existed) in the 6.8 tree.

See you back here in October for … Oracular Oriole!

Overnight temps here in Florida are dipping into the upper 60s which must mean it’s late October and fall is here! 🙂 Let’s check in with my bi-annual sports and Linux updates!

• After starting out the 2023 season red hot with a 13-game win streak (tying the record in the modern era), the Rays’ October baseball run only lasted until 10/4 when they were swept out of the AL Wild Card in 2 games by the Texas Rangers (who went on to win the ALCS and will be facing the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 2023 World Series). The Guardians finished a disappointing 3rd in the AL Central.
• Just one season after leaving the Browns, Baker Mayfield ended up in Tampa so I’m getting to watch him play again. The Bucs are currently 3-3 and are in 2nd place in the NFC South after the Falcons beat them last Sunday with a game-ending field goal. The Browns continue to be an enigma: they have one of the best defenses in the league and the Deshaun Watson “experiment” seems to be a failure. Despite that, our new third-string-to-starter QB PJ Walker, adding another name to the list of 36 starting Browns QBs since 1999, has the Browns at 4-2 (better than the Bucs!) but 4th place in the ever-tough AFC North. Love the alternate white uniforms though!
• The NBA season just starts today so the Cavs are tied with everyone else at 0-0. 🙂
• And finally the Lightning. After losing a bunch of good players in the off-season, it was announced, right before the season started, that goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy had back surgery in September and is expected to miss the first two months of the season! That means I won’t get to see him play when I go the Bolts/Kraken game next week here in Tampa, but maybe he’ll be back when I’m in Seattle for the Kraken/Bolts game in December. Backup goalie Jonas Johansson has taken the team on his shoulders though, and the Lightning sit at 7-3 with 8 points and 4th in the Atlantic division.

Let’s see … what else? Oh, right, a new version of Ubuntu, the Mantic Minotaur (23.10) was released earlier this month. After running my pre-upgrade backup scripts, the sudo do-release-upgrade -d command took about 20 minutes to download and install the new packages. Notice I had to use the -d parameter this time for some reason, otherwise it said there was no upgrade available.

The only problem I had this cycle was again due to a PHP upgrade. The process removed PHP 8.1 and upgraded to PHP 8.2 but for some inexplicable reason it removed the 8.1 packages for libapache-mod and mysql but did not install the corresponding 8.2 versions. This broke WordPress, my Piwigo photo gallery, etc. until I manually installed the two missing packages. At least I’m prepared for stuff like this now so it didn’t take long to troubleshoot and resolve the issue.

Until April then, when Noble Numbat (the next LTS release) comes out …