There were no serious problems, but these failures started becoming regular.  I realised it was because I was running Fedora 9, and many packages seemed to be getting updated for the latest version of Fedora, without retaining 100% compatibility with Fedora 9.  And while Fedora 9 is not particularly old in OS terms, it’s no longer a recent version – Fedora 11 is the current release, and an alpha of Fedora 12 is currently available for download.

So I decided now was a good time to upgrade to Fedora 11.  I considered Fedora 12 Alpha, but thought I’d best stick to an RTM release since I didn’t want to spend 4 hours a day every day for a month fixing it.

And so, what I learned was: back up your personal data.

After religiously backing up all the config files for everything I was running on the server, backing up all database, all websites, and making a list of everything installed, I went ahead and performed a clean install of Fedora 11.

And then I realised I had also been using Samba to provide file storage to our Windows machines.  Not only that, but I had previously decided to move (not copy, but move) all my photos from my desktop hard drive to the Linux server.  I have no idea why I didn’t notice them when I went through my list of things to back up, but miss them I did.  And now they are no more – apart from those in the gallery, every single photo I have ever taken was exploded into ones and zeroes for ever.