Got it! At 1am even.
I started a new ssh session and it showed 12.04 was running. Lots of packages needed updates so I ran the usual sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get upgrade and there was a warning about resolvconf. dpkg was unhappy. Many a googling provided sudo dpkg --configure -a but it was failing as well. Here's the saga:
josh@ccdev:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a Setting up resolvconf (1.63ubuntu16) ... start: Unknown job: resolvconf invoke-rc.d: initscript resolvconf, action "start" failed. dpkg: error processing resolvconf (--configure): subprocess installed post-installation script returned error exit status 1 Errors were encountered while processing: resolvconf I hunted down an existing resolvconf file and manually checked it over. It was identical to one that was working on a forum.
josh@ccdev:~$ sudo nano /etc/resolv.conf Which is when I found sudo initctl reload-configuration here.
josh@ccdev:~$ sudo initctl reload-configuration josh@ccdev:~$ sudo dpkg --configure -a Setting up resolvconf (1.63ubuntu16) ... resolvconf start/running Processing triggers for resolvconf ... Bam. Updates and upgrades worked fine. I also ran sudo service mysql stop just after starting the new session, just to be safe.