Who ever said open source software was perfect?

Typically, updates on the open source packages work without a hitch. However, my upgrade last weekend on my servers from Ubuntu Hardy to Intrepid wound up creating a couple major headaches, and at the same time, I noticed a handful of other snafoos happening to open source packages I use daily.

This wound up in server instability, client annoyance, and 20-30 hours solid of trial-and-error compiling, testing, debugging, etc. Even right now, if I forget to hold back the libgpac-dev package from being updated, all videos being converted lose their sound due to MP4Box crashing.

• NFS broke - on only *one* of six identically configured machines. For the time being, running 2.6.24-16-server has been my only workaround. Trying all three kernels in the Ubuntu repository (2.6.27-7-server, 2.6.27-10-server, and 2.6.28-2-server) all suffered from this issue. Sadly, could not provide much debugging or relevant information to anyone, the machine is in production and I've got nothing in logs to go off of. Five of the six servers are running the newer kernels without an issue, which is what is odd.
• ffmpeg broke resampling of a common audio type - oddly enough, this can be fixed by issuing two separate ffmpeg commands. There is a patch on the mailing list, but still not implemented into SVN.
• MP4Box no longer works on Ubuntu, due to an issue with libgpac-dev - still no fix available, have to force using an older libgpac-dev version.
• nginx releases 0.7.25, a new feature in 0.7.25 had a bug, 0.7.26 comes out - luckily, Igor's fix was quick and effective, before I even had a chance to run 0.7.25.
• PHP 5.2.7 comes out with a somewhat critical "security" issue (magic quotes was broken), has to release 5.2.8 shortly after - I have to wait for Suhosin and PHP-FPM patches before I can adopt a new version of PHP; otherwise, this may have caused some headache for me.
• MySQL 5.1 comes out with crashing bugs - I stick to using MySQL from the standard Ubuntu repositories, which usually has a decent lag while seeking "stability" - thank God for that.