Accidental Down Time

I run three websites off of my home desktop. They sit on virtual machines running within VMWare. This makes it convenient to keep them running without interfering with my personal machine, and I can easily backup or re-locate the virtual machines without disrupting operations.

As the newest Ubuntu release came out recently (Hardy Heron 8.04) I finally decided to upgrade my desktop to the latest and greatest. I had not anticipated the fact that VMWare does not currently have a release in the Ubuntu 8.04 repositories due to kernel changes. So I accidentally brought all three websites down because VMWare was no longer running. Since it was the middle of the day and I didn't have time to fix it (and I wanted to keep the websites up for the few visitors they do get) I thought of a solution and I thought it up quick (congratulations if you caught the Grinch reference there). I rebooted into Windows (haven't done that in about 8 months) and installed VMWare server there and got one of the virtual machines running again. The other virtual machine apparently got corrupted somehow and ended needing to be replaced from a backup.

Later that evening I rebooted back to Ubuntu and found the instructions to install VMWare manually.

Ladies and Gentlemen, that is why Virtual Machines are cool. Of course, what I should have done is send the Virtual Machines over to my laptop, and update my router to forward the traffic to it while I did the upgrade on my desktop. Live and Learn.