Bizarre. My self-signed SSL certificate I use to access my email using IMAP over SLL expired last week. The real significance is that we’ve been on this server for one year now. Compared to how painful working on the old Redhat 7.2 install we had back then, working with a Debian system has been a breeze.
So, I figured I’d just generate a new certificate, the instructions are readily googleable and I’d be playing a little Warcraft in no time. But no, after following the instructions Cyrus’s imap server wouldn’t start up. Eventually I figured out it was complaining about a missing lib related to the net-snmp package. A year ago, Cyrus 2.2 wasn’t in Debian testing yet, but it is now so it ended up being time to upgrade to the official packages.
The install was easy as usual, except for some disconcerting messages about my Cyrus databases needing an upgrade from DBD 3.2 to 4.2. To get the upgrade tool I installed the db4.2-utils package and ran the databases through the utility. I had my fingers crossed, with the spectre of data loss looming nearby (although I do have nightly backups that in theory I can recover from). The conversion worked well to, and all my email is in its place.
Feeling invincible, at this point I decided it was time to upgrade the kernel from the old stock 2.4 kernel to a newer 2.6 linux kernel. The only real reason is that I’d read Mysql performs noticeably better on the 2.6 kernels. Can you tell a difference? As far as I can tell, nothing is massively broken. If you notice anything odd though, please let me know!