In light of the Bash vulnerability or “ShellShock”, I decided to upgrade some of my servers to 14.04. I started with nextcode. I opened a terminal on my local machine, ssh’d in, and ran do-release-upgrade. Unfortunately, I forgot about class at 2:30pm.

The thing about Ubuntu release upgrades is they often prompt you for manual confirmation: “do you want to replace bla.conf? yN?”. I wanted to be able to respond to these requests while on campus. This would be trivial if I had originally ssh’d and opened a tmux session, which I didn’t.

No worries. I’ll suspend and background the upgrade process, open a new connection in tmux and let that shell take ownership of the process. Ez-Pz. So I do this, up to the final glorious step where the new shell would inherit the fragile process.

$ reptyr 1234

$ command not found

Hmm… I’ll just install it.

$ sudo apt-get install reptyr

$ [EXPLOSION]

Oops, dpkg is in the process of a distro upgrade. Uhh wait if I just kill the process, I’m sure I’ll be able to rerun do-release-upgrade and pick up where I left off, right? (Young and naive Michael, so full of hope in this world).

$ kill -9 ….

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

(No new releases found).

Rest in peace, looks like I’ve successfully completed a partial upgrade to 14.04. After running sudo dpkg -a configure, which seemed to finish the installation of 14.04 packages, nextcode is behaving quite strangely. Word on the street is a clean install might be scheduled.