Your old sins will come to pay you a visit once more

Some time ago, I had to shut down both of my Linux boxes at home since I needed to cut off electricity from some rooms while installing a ceiling fan (remember working safety!). All was well with the fan after switching electricity back on but then I tried getting the older server box up. It said it didn't have any disks. Well, that is a sure way to pump up stress hormone levels, and it did work on me again. The first suspicion was that since the hardware is rather old and had not been off for a looong time maybe some electronics just had died. But no, it didn't see either of the attached disks. Since that box was serving also as DHCP, DNS and gateway for LAN, and it was getting late in the evening, I just hacked the needed services up on the desktop box which luckily had pretty much the same firewall config already. DHCP didn't still work, though, and since we were about to leave on a holiday trip I just left it that way (later on I discovered there was just a stupid mistake in the config but that's the way it always goes, right?). Professionally it felt bad to leave my lady's web site offline, but she didn't seem to mind the long SLA.

After returning from the trip I took another try on trying to get the issues sorted out. Trying out a live cd proved that the hardware was alive and well. I had already been suspecting something about udev earlier based on some googling and found some info on kernel options CONFIG_SYSVS_DEPRECATED and CONFIG_SYSVS_DEPRECATED_V2. Disabled those, recompiled the kernel and behold, all was well again! I have absolutely no recollection why those were enabled (probably for supporting some older utilities), they had been that way for years already. Seems like Debian had evolved their udev implementation so that it had become incompatible with those features somewhere after the last reboot (which on the server box was 1.5 years earlier as I found out from the uptime logger afterwards). Serves me right for keeping a feature that is clearly meant to be transitory enabled for so long...

Well, this week I noticed that I had no sound on the desktop. First I just thought it was due to Flash which was not working in Opera anyway, so I installed Gnash and its dependencies. Too bad there was still no sound. No sound from much anything, actually. I got a crash course on sorting out Pulseaudio issues, but the end result was that I only had a dummy sound device available and even though Alsa seemed to recognise the emu10k1 device, there was just no sound at all.
Then I got a flash of enlightnenment. Those damned kernel options... the kernels were identical excluding things related to differing HW on the boxes, so also the desktop had the same deprecated features enable. Needless to say, disabling them made sun shine on me again. They really do seem to mess up with udev in unpredictable ways.

Uh, I just need to start paying more attention on what these boxes have installed and configured and not let them deteriorate....