Note: found this in my drafts … guess I forgot to post it back around October 17th, oops!

It’s October … time for cooler (?) weather, fall sports, and a new Ubuntu distro!

After a winning a franchise record 100 games, the Tampa Bay Rays’ season ended quickly in the ALDS losing in 4 games to the (ugh), wildcard Boston Red Sox. My Indians finished their last season as the Indians and although I’m still not enamored with the new Guardians name, I am looking forward to getting back out to Spring Training in March! Brady and the Bucs are sitting at 5-1, and after a 3-1 start, unfortunately Baker and the Browns are at 3-3. The Lightning’s season is just getting started but the 2020 and 2021 defending Stanley Cup Champions are 2-1 and both wins were in OT. Almost forgot about the Cavs … their season starts this week.

Ubuntu 21.10, Impish Indri, was also released this week, so it’s time to upgrade! This one was a bit problematic and almost all of the problems were due to the inclusion of PHP 8:

• MySQL was broken until I installed php8.0-mysql
• my primary Piwigo photo site was completely broken since it was still running Piwigo 11.5 so I had to upgrade to the 12.0.0RC2 release candidate
• even after upgrading, my Piwigo site was filled with ‘undefined array key’ warnings (I had to update the local config to ignore E_WARNING messages)
• the Search Everything plugin for WordPress was broken due to PHP. the plugin is no longer maintained but I found a manual fix that got it working again
• and not PHP-related, but for some reason phpMyAdmin was removed, so I had to reinstall it

The list looks short, but it took me a while to work through everything. This is what I get (and I accept it!) for upgrading right away without letting a few days pass and see what kind of problems other people have.

Anyway, that settles things until April, by which time I’ll have hopefully spent some time watching baseball in the Arizona sun before the next upgrade to Jammy Jellyfish!

Spring is here (although my parents up in OH just experienced a late-April snow storm!) which means it’s time to upgrade my Linux server to the new Ubuntu release, 21.04 (Hirsute Hippo). First, the obligatory check-in on my spring sports teams:

• the Lightning will be heading back to the playoffs to defend their Stanley Cup title … they’re currently third in the Central division in a tight race for 1st with the Hurricanes and Panthers
• the Rays are in 2nd place in the AL East, just behind the Red Sox
• the Indians are right in the middle of the AL Central, falling behind the Royals and White Sox
• the Cavaliers are near the bottom of the Eastern Conference and unsurprisingly won’t make the playoffs this year
• Brady and Gronk will be back with the Bucs in the fall when they start to defend their Super Bowl title

Ok, Linux. Despite the issues I had back in October (mostly due to the deprecation of Python 2), the April updates are usually smoother. After a quick backup, I launched the do-release-upgrade and about 20 minutes and a few configuration file updates later, I was up and running on the latest release with the 5.11 kernel:

$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 21.04
Release: 21.04
Codename: hirsute


$ uname -r
5.11.0-16-generic

I haven’t had an issue free upgrade since Cosmic so I usually find myself Googling for various solutions. This time around, I had a few minor problems:

• When logging in, the login banner showed “There were exceptions while processing one or more plugins. See /var/log/landscape/sysinfo.log for more information.” and the sysinfo.log file showed:
  
  2021-04-22 21:03:25,207 ERROR Network plugin raised an exception. Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/landscape/sysinfo/sysinfo.py", line 99, in run result = plugin.run()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/landscape/sysinfo/network.py", line 36, in run device_info = self._get_device_info()
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/landscape/lib/network.py", line 163, in get_active_device_info speed, duplex = get_network_interface_speed(
File "/usr/lib/python3/dist-packages/landscape/lib/network.py", line 249, in get_network_interface_speed res = status_cmd.tostring()

  It appears that the array.tostring function was deprecated in Python 3.2 and removed in Python 3.9 (which came with the upgrade) but landscape-sysinfo was still using the function call in the Network plugin. I applied a patch (changing tostring to tobytes) and that resolved the issue.

• I couldn’t get vncserver to start:
  
  Session startup via '/home/windracer/.vnc/xstartup' cleanly exited too early (< 3 seconds)!
xrdb: Bad file descriptor
xrdb: Can't open display ':1'
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused
xfce4-session: Cannot open display: .

  In my startx file, I switched from startxfce & to exec startxfce which fixed the startup issue, but I still couldn’t connect to the server remotely. It turned out that tigervnc server was only listening on localhost (127.0.0.1). I found that during the upgrade, my /etc/vnc.conf file had been renamed (and the log said it was a deprecated file). I had to make a copy of /etc/tigervnc/vncserver-config-default to ~/.vnc/vnc.conf then set $localhost="no"; (which is what I had done in my original vnc.conf file) and then I was able to connect with the tightvnc client on my PC.

Nothing major. See you here again in October for 21.10 (Impish Indri)!