Upgrading Linux, a study in pain

[andrewducker]

I've got a small PC sitting on a shelf. It's my Plex server, and it runs Ubuntu 16.

Or, at least, it used to. About two weeks ago it offered me an upgrade to Ubuntu 18. Which seemed to happily churn away. And everything worked fine.

No, of course it didn't work fine. The Plex server refused to show any of the files from the network hard drive (NAS). And when I tried to connect to it with VNC that didn't work either.

Which meant that I had to physically connect a mouse, keyboard, and monitor to it. Something I hadn't done in a couple of years, since I originally set it up. (And that box only has a VGA connector, so I had to go buy a new VGA cable, as I'd thrown out 20 years of cables last year.)

When I could finally see the screen I discovered that the built in VNC client didn't work. And every time you tried to open the Control Panel's "Remote Desktop" panel it crashed instantly. I eventually found a bug report from January this year. Which doesn't fill me with confidence that it will ever be fixed.

Which means that every time I want to update the box I'll need to drag a mouse, keyboard, and monitor through. Great.

Next up - why is Plex not connecting to my mounted drives? Step 1 - look at the "fstab" file, which contains all of the magical incantations for hooking up a network drive to the PC*. Oh, no, the method I'd been using for that in the past (gksu) has been deprecated. So I can't run an editor as root to view a system file. Googling for a few minutes finds an answer to that. Yay.

I finally look at the fstab file, thinking it might have been overwritten by the upgrade. But no, everything looks exactly the same as it always did. So I run "mount -a", which should attach to all of the drives mentioned in the file. Everything works.

Great, I think, must have been a temporary glitch. I'll do a reboot to check. It doesn't work. So I go looking through log files. Eventually find an entry hidden in the boot logs which tells me to run a command-line which tells me it can't find the NAS. Which is odd - it can't find it at boot, but it can find it if I run the same process later on?

Turns out that connecting to my NAS by name, which has been working fine for the past two years, is now not working. Could be that it's loading the server name resolution software after it attempts to mount the drives. Wouldn't surprise me that it does something so stupid. Not after the way I've just wasted a couple of hours**.

As it happens, I'm assigning a static IP to the NAS anyway, so I update the fstab to point to it via IP address rather than server name. Everything works. I'm not sure I care why it works. I am ever more sure that Linux is not ready for the average user***.

*No, there's no nice UI to walk you through the process. Why do you ask?
**It has just occurred to me that this might have been reset by the upgrade. But the mouse, keyboard, and monitor are all back in the other room. So I'm not touching that until VNC is working again.
*** If your answer to "How do you add a link to your networked files, using the most networked file-sharing protocol in the world", is this then, no, you're not ready.

Comments

[randomdreams]

I've run across so many issues with timing dependencies on boot. I get the reason for that, and even have worked through how to force it to boot modules in the order that I need for the hardware I have connected, but uggghhhhh.

[theandrewhickey]

Suspect it's not a timing dependency but something else weird. I had a very similar problem about a year or so ago where I couldn't get my laptop to point to my networked drives. Turned out that changing hostname to hostname.local in fstab fixed that problem. Still don't know exactly what caused it, but presume that something in your upgrades did the same thing.

[moniqueleigh]

I had similar problems just upgrading my regular PC from 17 to 18 a couple of months back. It took hours to get things working in anything resembling usable fashion. A couple of weeks later, I realized that WINE had decided to suddenly stop even pretending to work. It took days to sort out why. And then a couple of hours after that to figure out why one bloody program wouldn't run in WINE, even though by all rights it ought have done.

Some days I think maybe I should go back to Windows. Then I remember the headache that was upgrading to 10 (& taking one computer back to 7 Pro) at work. /sob/

[andrewducker]

It's really not how we'd like to be spending our time!

[nojay]

Linux is very user-friendly, it's just very picky about who its friends are.

I have a black thumb with Linux, I have NEVER had an install work sufficiently well for me to use it long-term. For me Windows Always Works. I don't understand why other folks say Windows is difficult to set up and use, in the same way that fans of Linux seemingly don't suffer the problems I run into with Linux.

[andrewducker]

Yeah. I've not had even minor problems with Windows at home for years!

[marahmarie]

Gosh, I'm sort of jealous. Windows = easier than Linux, maybe or maybe not (I last ran some flavor of Ubuntu with WINE (is this possible, or do I misremember what went with what?) maybe 10 years ago and it wasn't that hard once I was past the GUI learning curve, nor did it seem like that much fun nor worth using over Windows in any way - but when I tried to install it again on another rig and it failed on networking, I gave up (this was roughly 2012; the motherboard didn't support a TPM module or the module was missing or something)). Windows is just...mostly daily little grievances (there's a few right now I'm living with) as compared to the more major disasters a FOSS OS might present.

[moniqueleigh]

I can't speak for others, but for myself, I keep running into times where I need to be able to get into the guts of the OS (for example: to make something run the way I need it to run as opposed to the way the company says it ought to run, or to figure out *why* something isn't running at all). With Linux, it may take a few days of searching every conceivable iteration on Google before I hit upon the magic phrase that gets me what I need; but with Windows, it's just as likely that the answer will be "Microsoft won't let you do that. If you do that, you will void the warranty/see only the current version of the Blue Screen of Death/watch your tower go up in flames."

Nothing like going, "It says Blue Screen of D- hey grab the fire extinguisher real quick?"

[marahmarie]

The thing where it goes up in flames is all the fun!

Also, ikr? (I had several older Dell laptops almost ignite in my distant-ish past, so can sort of relate).

[myka]

blah I never got the hang of linux