Spent most of Saturday doing something I probably should've done months ago: actually reading the release notes before hitting upgrade. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, codename Trusty Tahr, went out the door on Thursday, and because its an LTS release, five years of support this time instead of three, I figured Id do the responsible thing and not just blindly run do-release-upgrade on my home server the second it showed up in the package list.
Also, honestly, I still had Heartbleed cleanup to finish, and this felt like a good excuse to knock out both at once.
If you run anything with a public-facing port you already know about Heartbleed. Its been about eleven days since Codenomicon and the Google security researchers went public with it and Im still seeing people in forums asking whether they need to do anything about it. Yes. You do. Rotate your keys, regen your certs, and change any password you typed into a site that was vulnerable, especially if you reused it anywhere else. I patched OpenSSL on my box the day the news broke, but I never actually got around to reissuing the SSL cert for this blog until this weekend, which in hindsight is a little embarrassing given I write about this stuff.
Anyway. Trusty Tahr.
The upgrade took about forty minutes on my little home server, longer on the laptop because I made the mistake of running it over hotel wifi at my sisters place while half watching a movie with everyone else. Nothing broke, which after a couple of past LTS upgrades that did break things (looking at you, 12.04 to 13.04, though to be fair that wasnt even an officially supported jump) felt like a genuine relief. The desktop doesnt look drastically different if youre coming from 13.10, mostly some Unity polish and the usual stack of updated packages, but under the hood theres a newer kernel and an OpenSSL branch with the Heartbleed patches already baked in, which is really the whole reason I wanted this done this week instead of next month.
One thing Ill actually complain about: the upgrade prompted me to keep or overwrite six different config files and gave me approximately zero context about what changed in each one. I ended up opening a second terminal and diffing them by hand, which is not how a Saturday afternoon is supposed to go. I understand why it works this way, but somebody could make that screen a lot less scary for people who arent going to sit there reading diffs.
Small tangent, but I was reading through my RSS backlog while apt was chewing through packages and saw the news about Kepler-186f, the Earth sized planet NASA announced Thursday, sitting in the habitable zone of a star about five hundred light years out. I dont have anything smart to say about exoplanet astronomy, I just think its a little wild that anyone can say with real confidence "thats a rocky planet, roughly Earth sized, in the zone where liquid water could exist" about something that far away, using a telescope thats been sitting up there quietly doing this since 2009. Kepler doesnt get anywhere near the attention SpaceX gets and I think thats a little unfair, honestly.
Back to boring server maintenance. If youre still on 13.10, that release goes end of life in July, so theres a window but not a huge one. If youre on 12.04 already, youre fine until 2017 and probably dont need to touch anything right now beyond double checking your OpenSSL package actually picked up the Heartbleed patch, because the exact point release matters here and not everyone realizes that.
Tomorrow Im going to actually test my backups instead of just assuming they work, which is a sentence I apparently need to write on this blog every six months to shame myself into doing it.