I upgraded my linode server from ubuntu distro lucid to precise today. I didn't have any specific needs, but lucid is getting EOLed in a couple months.

It broke my DNS server. This is what ended up fixing it: ( Read more... )

Didn't find any web search hits, so I thought I'd document it:

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I've had a lot of problems listening to stuff with apparently screwed up (horribly imbalanced) stereo lately. A useful solution I just found is the mplayer argument "-channels 1". It causes mplayer to ask the audio decoder to give it 1 audio channel. I still wish pulseaudio had a simple built in mix-to-mono function.

A developer asked a question implying that he held a belief directly conflicting with a major design feature of the relevant software.

I asked how he managed to not be aware of that design feature so long, in spite of an architecture page and diagrams clearly indicating it.

He replied: sorry i did not believe it was real :D
( Actual conversation )

Ksplice. Available in the Ubuntu Universe repository since Karmic (October 2009 ( Read more... )

I had some data loss that caused me to seriously question my sanity.

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This is my third unexpected outage in the 2.7 years I've had it. This time there were no clues as to the reason. The only solution appears to be rebuilding the kernel with KDB, the kernel debugger. If this happens again, I'll be asking linode to provide that ( Read more... )

"The Ubuntu software repository is divided into four components - main, restricted, universe and multiverse..."

People who maintain universe are called the Ubuntu MOTU team.

Masters of the universe.