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after upgrading an old server from "Gutsy Gibbon" all the way through to "Natty Nanny-goat" (or whatever it was) everything was running generally ok...

Then... I upgraded one more time to 11.10, Oneric something-or-other and my trusty server wouldn't boot. The server would boot to the splash screen, then offer me the chance to manually recover, ignore or skip mounting.

Skipping and ignoring did nothing, so, on to single user mode :)

udevd errors abound! apparently udev rules are changing and I should use SYMLINK= instead of something else, but this was solved by reading the README:

#less /etc/udev/rules.d/README
#rm /etc/udev/rules.d/*
#reboot

This resolved all my udev issues as the readme points out that udev will do all the automatic stuffs you need. But, my computer still won't boot... single user mode once more...

mountall: some filesystems failed to mount

and there it would sit, I could drop down to console and

#telinit 2

which booted me to a usable system, I could even mount my nfs shares... but no smooth boot.

I edited them out of fstab, still hung.

A few posters in the forum suggested trying an earlier kernel, they wouldn't boot either, so I then gave up and put Gentoo on; so much for Ubuntu being the easy, friendly one :( -----

well, here I was having set up another server and didn't want her ticking over all the time (she's moving away to be a mail relay, so rather moot running here... but I digress). I wanted the computer to come on by wake on LAN (WoL) and couldn't work out why after running

#ethtool -s eth3 wol g

which sets the computer to listen for a magic WoL packet (on eth3 in this case) the computer wouldn't wake up.

I added the same command to /etc/local.d/wol.start and /etc/local.d/wol.stop. Gentoo says files in /etc/local.d will be executed on startup or shutdown depending on the .start or .stop extension. I duly shutdown and tried to wake Macha...

wakeonlan -i 192.168.1.255 00:11:XX:XX:XX:XX 

(where 00:11:XX:XX:XX:XX is the MAC address of eth3 and 192.168.1.255 is the broadcast address of my LAN)

...nothing. I'd made the schoolboy error... scripts need to be executable...

#chmod 755 /etc/local.d/wol.*

and all was as it should be. -----

was accessing one of my servers over ssh, and wanted to change the volume of the media I had playing, but the alsamixer display was all messed up.

after lots of looking around the internets, I had determined that my local (Gentoo) server was running with a POSIX default locale, and my remote (Ubuntu) server was running with a UTF-8 default locale.

Now, I'll be honest, I thought locales worked in such a way as you installed as many as you wanted and your computer could switch between them as needed (which I suppose is a bit silly). But it turns out that you get a locale and as best I can tell, unless you start a new environment / shell then you are stuck with the locale chosen on the start of the environment / shell.

So... to get round this, I decided to change my Gentoo system to display in UTF-8:

in /etc/bash/bashrc

export LC_CTYPE="en_GB.UTF-8"

and now all displays fine :) - will need to find out any implications of this later... -----