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.

But at the weekend it refused to upload anything successfully, complaining about PHP and web server upload limits – things over which I have no control. So I went back to using the clunky web interface to upload my photos, only to be greeted by the useless “Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage” page on each attempt.

Things didn’t look good. So I decided to download a cleaner-looking and simpler gallery application (Plogger) to give it a go. Still no luck.

Having ruled out the problem being Gallery2, I decided my website host had changed some things on their side. A quick Google later, and I realised that I couldn’t upload anything more than small text files to any server. So it’s not my website host.

Good job I didn’t send them that email.

But wait, I can upload files to the gallery using a machine on the other side of the corporate VPN… which uses the corporate Internet connection. So it must be my ISP. It must be. Surely? After another quick Google, I read that a number of ISPs have been caught sending fake TCP reset packets to their users so that ‘undesirable’ connections (ie. file sharing applications) are disconnected.

Knowing how to troubleshoot this kind of problem, I proceed to download Wireshark, a network protocol analyzer (formerly Ethereal). Sure enough, each time I try to upload a .jpeg or .bmp or… in fact almost any type of file, I receive a TCP RST message – surely the fake reset message sent to me by my interfering ISP!

However, it seems that my ISP is blameless after all.

It turns out the latest firmware for my Draytek 2800 router adds an innocent-looking option called “Drop non-http connection on TCP port 80″ which is enabled by default. I feel it should be more accurately called “break everything”. Disabling it fixed the problem, but it took an entire lunch break.

It’s been a while since my last post; everything’s been a bit hectic here – not least of all due to the new addition to our family, an 8-week-old Black Labrador puppy called Oliver!

He came home on Friday the 31st of August, and made quick work of exploring his new surroundings. We’re now in the process of adjusting to being up and about by 7am, and making trips to the garden every hour and a half or so. But it’s lots of fun, and he’s a very loving little boy.

There are some pics in the gallery.