Site downtime, Saturday 14th April 2007
Posted by Steve on Fri 13 Apr 2007 at 10:43
I'm just posting this to give advance warning that this site may be unavailable for parts of Saturday morning. Hopefully the downtime should be only a couple of hours at the most.
Update: Etch upgrade complete. No significant issues.
The reason for the downtime is two-fold:
- Firstly I wish to upgrade the host machine to Debian's new release, Etch.
- Secondly I wish to reorganise the software which is installed upon the box.
There will be a further few hours of downtime later in the month, or early next month, when I setup some clusters, but otherwise this should be the only interruption in service for the forseeable future.
Thanks for your patience!
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sno
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Started with the laptop, did a final aptitude update and dist-upgrade under sarge, did a dpkg audit, changed the source list to Etch, everything looking a-okay, down to single user, start 'script' to keep a running account of any errors, woo-hoo start the upgrade with just 'upgrade' first then init.d-tools and then a kernel image (I gave up custom kernels last year. No point for desktop systems anymore.) and this is where I ran into catch-22 dependency hell. Aptitude said I could have the new kernel but the rest of the system was no longer needed and would be removed. It got worse from there. Ah, I can check the script I had running. Gone! Never even got to dist-upgrade and was not able to determine the cause(s) of the problems.
Using all the GNU/Linux knowledge and skills I've acquired over the last ten years I arrived at a simple solution for the problem. I downloaded and burnt a net install iso and did a fresh install. It worked perfectly on both computers and I'm very happy with Etch. I believe the only thing I'll add from my Sarge back-ups is some music.
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If you can, post some information about this/these migration(s). I'm very interested about it.
Good luck.
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This machine is currently a dedicated host, graciously provided by Bytemark. (Donated shortly before I started working for them..) So there is no Xen involved here at the moment.
The plan is to partition this up into a Xen system, so that it can be configured with 3-4 guests each doing a different thing. Maybe something like this:
- Web-server (+memcached)
- Web-server (+memcached)
- Web-server load-balancer
- Database-server (+memcached)
Thats the work that will be carried out in a month or so, after the upgrade to Etch tomorrow.
I'm not sure if it will help the site, but I think it is something I'd do regardless, because it will allow a lot of admin tasks to be simplified for me.
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The number of processes has however doubled since the upgrade.
Cheers,
Julien
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To be honest no, but I didn't upgrade my kernel since I'm running a backported 2.6.20 .. so if there was a speedup it was gained a while ago.
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Cheers, should be fixed now.
I'd forgotten to reset the minimum length of the word to be included in a FULLTEXT index - which defaults to four. This is as described in our article on MySQL fulltext searches for reference.
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Thanks a lot!
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I had to install sarge with the 2.4 kernel (it's 2.6 does the same thing) and then do a dist-upgrade. At this time my CD is not that important and my research shows it's something to do with SATA drives and bios making the CD look like SATA or something like that.
I can say it has substantially improved my vmware server speed compared to the junky 2003 that I originally tried it on. I just need to figure out how to get my CD-rom working again and then I will be happy. I have a poweredge 750 running sarge right now that I need to upgrade. I imagine that one will also have the cd problem.
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Servers though, because they generally do not need X and other fancy stuff, have an easy time being upgraded.
One thing I noticed is that http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US can not have stable replaced with etch, as was the case with sarge.
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Yes non-US was removed some time ago.
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