Ubuntu Server Dist Upgrade Joy, Outlook

  1. Ubuntu Server Upgrade - Is a configuration show, sigh? I've rebooted systems today for about 500 times, errors more errors, strange errors, stuff doesn't work, hangs, hangs on reboot. So depressing. Still, mounts fail, logging fails, DNS fails, IPv6 fails, Nginx fails... Blah... Maybe these problems are resolved before next LTS version comes out? And finally, networking refused to completely start, requiring console visit. How much bleeping computer stuff can there be? Well, it seems that the Ethernet link doesn't even come up. What would cause that? No mention whatsoever in logs. Reliable systems, yeah right. So typical, things don't get better, they only get worse. Just like that XKCD 349 (@ xkcd). If it's slightly broken, like requires manual work after reboot, that's just fine. I did restore earlier config, nope, same situation persists, networking doesn't work at all. No reason whatsoever, link is also down on hardware level. Hardware broken? Sounds really unlikely, but who knows. Maybe it's just misdirection by the operating system. I've so many times seen situations when people say that something is broken, when it its just slightly misconfigured. I'll guess I'll have to boot a live distribution to confirm the network and hardware, making sure it's only the netplan causing all this trouble. Yet it doesn't give any error whatsoever. I've already restored the original configuration files. Few hours later, it's up'n'running again, privacy IPv6 addressing isn't still working. I guess I'll need to write my own code for that, which will deal with the situation easily. But this is what learning is, through suffering and testing out and reading more and testing again, until success (?).

About networking and routing, currently routing works for a while, but then goes down and it seems that there's some kind of local routing loop. I'd guess it's because I've got configured some addresses on two interfaces with /64. I think I'll remove those tunneling interface addresses and let routing take care of it. Let's see what happens. Yes, that fixed the routing loop error. Or when things are correctly configured, primary question is, why would the addresses need to be configured twice. Shouldn't it work after routing. Let's see. And DNS is broken again.

Well, it seems that the DNS is pretty inherently broken with Ubuntu 20.04, you'll need a delay after reboot, before restarting systemd-resolved that really sucks. Even if I restart it immediately after reboot, it's still fails so start. Quality stuff. Sigh. Maybe there just needs to be a cronjob to restart it. Yep, that's how all good systems work. Automated restarts due to random / unknown failure scenarions. Nothing new. Every 5 minutes, check if resolved is running, if not, restart it. Duh... Really? Another interesting thing is IPv6-privacy option, it seems that the privacy addresses are sometimes present, but not always, and even if present, not being used as default, even if... use_tempaddr = 2 is guaranteed to be on. Final reboot, if everything is now even somewhat working, I'm done. Yep, now I know it. Just login on Sunday morning using ssh and restart resolved, it's broken by design and privacy address is generated, but not being used after all. - Anyway, it's so wonderful to start every Sunday with this stuff. I've been thinking about renaming my server to - Cenobite - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenobite_(Hellraiser) -. Only problem with broken DNS is that system updates and Let's Encrypt cert renewals are quite likely to fail. Some posts say that I'm probably missing libss-resolve, yes I am. It isn't installed, yet, if that's absolutely required then it shouldn't work even after restarts. Something is a miss here. Maybe there's listed start dependency which isn't actually required. Wouldn't be a first time. Yet, again, the error messages are often really bad or misleading. Traditional way of trolling users and making troubleshooting much more fun. - This is also a good sample why console access is very handy, even if some say it's not required. It is, because otherwise situation would be quite hard to resolve. Yet, another case where you should always run with defaults. Never change anything, always use the default config. In that case, it's trivial to reinstall the systems always when new version comes out and there's no problem with updates. Running with minimum configuration saves a lot of time in long run. Because every additional thing, causes trouble and requires extra maintenance over time. - What's the cost in terms of time wasted as well the bonus, mental energy lost due to random issues and frustration.

  1. This also applies to one of the reasons why people don't want to use IPv6, it creates huge tangled mess of hard to resolve problems, which many are very frustrating and take a lot of time to troubleshoot and even the worst part. Are impossible to troubleshoot for most of people.

  2. This is just as hilarious as the Outlook and TPM stuff, which is also totally failing. And what's the best part, nobody's going to fix it. It's just how it is.

2021-10-17