Yah, there should be an apostrophe at the end of "users" in my article reply. Oopsies.

Spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why apache mysteriously stopped after an upgrade. AFAICT, I needed to have the order of two statements switched in httpd.conf. Very confusing. The worst part was that it was completely silent when dying. Ah well, fixed now.

I have now learned to use apt_preferences to pin packages at certain releases. Now I need to code up a cron job to figure out when those are updated, so I can schedule a mass-upgrade session.

I pinned both apache and exim, since I've had problems with both in the recent past(both config file things!), and I'm trying to run a pseudo-production server here. Hmm, I should pin mailman too. [done]. Nothing else is as critical as those packages.

Update: there were(are?) still some problems with my apache configuration. I got images working again, and allowed IDS to be executed. Bah, I say. Does anybody know exactly WTF happened to make apache so unhappy with me? Did it suddenly start obeying some guidelines that it was ignoring before?