Upgraded our internal samba fileshare. Was getting too old. So updating the apt sources list and push the dist-upgrade: what could possibly go wrong?
Everything.
Somehow the locale went astray, updating the manpages gave too many errors and now finally everything's fucked up, because it somehow deleted the sudo binary and root is locked or we don't have password.
We noobs.
But samba was updated and it's still serving our files.

Back up the files and reinstall. dist-upgrade worked from 14.04 to 16.04 but 16.04 to 18.04 really did not work for me. Had to reinstall 🤷‍♂️

How come when other people rub dist-upgrade they fully upgrade their distro but when I have to use do-release-upgrade?

Time to get nasty and "/bin/bash -ro"!
Ups! -rw 😳

Get rid of that snowflake server and run smbd from within a container (mount whatever files its sharing as a separate volume) so you can upgrade the OS independently from it

@unsignedint Maybe it's time I overcome my reservations against the docker hype train,.. but y'know we were deploying into lxc in 2012 and in one installation on a virtualized server their backups were f** us up,.. next I ran into a docker fleet as build system for about 15 linux distros, boy what a pain, at least cross compiling saved us a factor 2.

So I somehow value that thing being a full fledged VM.

(In the end: docker or VM, the problem is that you often don't have a proper snapshot once you break it)

@stereohisteria Was even thinking running my privesc scripts first. But didn't want to bring my hacking stuff to work..

@phorkyas nah! Not a hack, but a reasonable measure. I'd do that and go straigt dpkg-reconfigure and configs. Although @unsignedint nis kind of right; use docker and blow that shit :D