That was fun: mysql update nuked remote access

Update your packages, they said. It will be more secure, they said. I guess it was. No network access to the databases. Even after turning the database server instance to listen again on the right port, I had to go in and redo the passwords and privileges. So yeah, this broke my MySQL instance for a few hours. Took longer to debug as it was late at night and I was sleepy, so I put it off until morning with caffeine. I know containers are all the rage now (and I’ve been a proponent of that for a while), but this was a bare metal system running the database, with a bunch of VM based services (I want stronger isolation guarantees than I can get out of docker and related things on linux … I know I know, use SmartOS … planning to for some other stuff, as I have somewhat more time to play/learn/do ). Still … surprises like this … not so good. Goes back to my theory that distributions should have as small an install as possible, with services offered as VMs and/or containers. So software updates can be trivially rolled back if and when … they break something. I did this in the past at Scalable Informatics with the software defined appliances, where the entire OS image can be rolled forward/backwards with a simple reboot, as it was immutable. Really a distro needs to be this … the whole concept of a bare metal install should be one of absolutely minimal footprint, with hooks to enable modular services/functions/features.