Oh, &%$#... What did Aptitude do? It built new kernel but at reboot root file system is read-only...

Did ANYONE get the license number of that truck? I'm not sure what happened here...

A few days ago, I tried migrating mailman 2.1.11 to my Debian etch4.0r3 server by backing up my old install of the mailman app and its data from my old Redhat server (where it had been running under python 2.4) and moving it to my new Debian server and extracting it from the archive in usr/local/mailman (where it would also be running under python 2.4!) I figured Python was an interpretive language. So, if I was running the same version of it and mailman on both servers, this should work... right?

Wrong! That approach was unsuccessful. I'm not sure why. It seemed to me that what I did should have worked fine. But for some reason it did not.

So today I started over. I began by renaming the /usr/local/mailman directory (to protect its archives (data) directory contents from accidental deletion).

Next, I checked to confirm the python version installed on my debian server was still okay using python -v from the shell prompt to verify that python ran and to confirm what version it was. Python came up saying it was v2.4.

So far so good...

My third step was to download a fresh copy of mailman 2.1.1 from the gnu server and unzip and untar it into a fresh mailman directory where it would soon be installed. As soon as that was finished, I started gradually working through the setup process to install Mailman using the admin installation guide on gnu's mailman site. However, when I got to the step that told me to run ./configure, I did that and the configure immediately bitched that there was something wrong with the python installation and insisted python should be repaired before continuing. The interesting part is python 2.4 had been installed with aptitude but had not yet been used since because I hadn't needed it yet. It was installed specifically for the needs of this site and for the mailman application. So, I'm not sure how python got "damaged".

Okay... now I was suddenly on a whole new trouble shooting path. What I did next was fire up aptitude and uninstall python 2.4 completely with the intent of reinstalling it immediately. Of course the way aptitude works it simultaneously removed a list of other apps and libraries that were no longer needed. When the uninstall completed, I turned around and reinstalled python and its docs along with a python runtime speedup tool named psyco all at once.

Halfway through that install, aptitude informed me it was "now installing a new version of the linux kernel" (Oops! I hadn't ASKED for or authorized a kernel upgrade. So where the devil did it come from? I dunno!). In that 'informational notice', aptitude recommended that I should reboot the server immediately after the install was finished so the kernel upgrade and configuration process could be completed.

Naturally, I followed those instructions to the letter, but when I went back and logged on to the system after the reboot I discovered that:

1. The root file system is now "read only"
2. my "newly installed" mailman directory seems to have completely vanished. In its place is the old
original mailman directory from two weeks ago that I had renamed to mailman.save earlier today.
3. not ONE of the websites on my server can be accessed now. I'm sure that's because the primary file system
is "read only"

Is there anyone here who has a clue what I've done wrong and how to fix it? I'm completely bewildered and confused at this point.

Thanks!