On December 8, 2020 the CentOS project IBM-Redhat announced that it was about to throw away years of good will and trust for seemingly little good reason.
My 2020 Games of the Year
The hardest part of writing this post was trying to remember what I played at the beginning of the year. Games that I played near the beginning of the year and that I thought were really quite good or even exceptional I nearly forgot about when it came to making this list. It’s just been that kind of year.
These games are going to me in an entirely arbitrary order, there is no ranking here. I enjoyed all of these games for different reasons and it would be a disservice to their quality to have them be in a ranked list.
Let’s get started.
Continue reading “My 2020 Games of the Year”Thoughts on the Overwatch League 2020 Grand Finals Weekend
Here we are folks. This is the final weekend of the 2020 season. Its Grand Finals time. Four teams remain in the final bracket. Two of them will face off in a grand finals match. One of them will be our 2020 OWL champion.
Let’s get right into it!
Continue reading “Thoughts on the Overwatch League 2020 Grand Finals Weekend”Notes from my server upgrades to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS
This past weekend I learned that Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS was out. This meant that I could start upgrading my servers from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS as that is when do-release-upgrade makes the next LTS release available for upgrade.
I started with my web server i.e the server this blog is hosted on. Mostly because I’ve been wanting PHP 7.4 for my WordPress sites and Ubuntu 20.04 would give me that. The upgrade went without issue and after a small configuration change to nginx to make sure it used the new Unix socket for PHP 7.4 FPM, we were all good to go.
From then on, I went ahead and started doing more of the servers, in the order of the servers that were least likely to break with the upgrade.
Breakages and Manual Interventions
Some of my servers failed to upgrade the grub-pc package during the dist-upgrade process. dpkg simply returned a error code. This was fixed by purging grub-pc and installing the grub2 package and then configuring it according to Linode’s documentation on GRUB2. I’m not entirely sure why the grub-pc package failed to upgrade.
All my servers also needed the apt sources list entry for the Icinga repository manually updated to use focal. My Mastodon servers needed repository entries for nodesource manually updated as well.
Ubuntu 20.04 brought with it PostgreSQL 12 and that means manually upgrading the installs and databases on my PostgreSQL 10 servers. This involves dropping the newly created empty 12 ‘main’ cluster and then running pg_upgradecluster on the 10 ‘main’ cluster. After that completed, the 10 ‘main’ cluster can be dropped. I didn’t run into any issues here. I did take a manual backup of database(s) before I started the process and I would recommend everyone do that if possible.
I will however note here that since the process creates a copy of the database into the 12 cluster, you will nearly double your disk usage. This can be a problem if you have large pgsql databases and do not have enough spare disk space on your servers to complete the process. Something to keep in mind if you are planning on doing one of these.
Since PostgreSQL was upgraded to 12, the pgbackrest configuration and stanza needed to be updated. Their documentation goes through the process but I didn’t need to use it as it is fairly straight forward.
Bits, Bobs and Final Thoughts
Overall the process of upgrading my servers to Ubuntu 20.04 was fairly smooth. I didn’t encounter any catastrophic failures or data loss. If I had I could have reverted to the manual snapshots I took of the servers before I started.
I’m glad to finally have PHP 7.4 on my web server and WordPress no longer complaining about having to use PHP 7.2.
Another neat thing to note is that one of my servers was initially provisioned on 14.04 and has over the years been upgraded through LTS Ubuntu releases. So 14.04 -> 16.04 -> 18.04 -> 20.04.
That’s all from me!
Thoughts on week 2 of Overwatch League 2020 Playoffs
The second week of the playoffs have concluded and with it we have a bunch more teams eliminated leaving us with the illustrious four who have now made it to the grand finals bracket. Let’s talk about the various story lines that happened this week, the ones that came to an end and the ones that we will see conclude in October.
Continue reading “Thoughts on week 2 of Overwatch League 2020 Playoffs”