Weblog entry #376 for simonw
See all weblog entries made by simonw.
Lessons learnt
1) Don't wing it.
Consult with "dpkg" on #Debian before you start, "/msg #dpkg lenny->squeeze" gives the instructions.
I did what I did to get from Etch to Lenny, and the process was painful, and unnecessarily time consuming.
2) "aptitude --download-only full-upgrade" up front got me 1.5GB of updates. Having them local made troubleshooting easier so I recommend downloading up front additional to dpkg instructions on the assumption it will go wrong. In my case at one point "aptitude" was broken which I fixed with dpkg and the local apt cache, could have fixed it with wget and dpkg, but your system might be in a worse shape than mine at that point.
3) Upgrade the kernel first and reboot as per instructions from dpkg.
This avoids the udev problem, as udev insists on a later kernel, and so by rebooting with a newer kernel first the install will be slicker. Easily worked around by touching the file in the udev error message, and ensuring you install the kernel.
4) All your Grub foo is useless now grub-pc has arrived.
I hit bug #586447 with grub-pc unable to install a bootable system on software RAID with LVM2. Hopefully I will be the last person to hit it, as between the start and middle of my installation the grub-pc version in testing was updated.
However grub-pc had dug itself into a hole, I eventually resolved by booting from a Lenny rescue CD, using the chroot on /dev/VG00/root, installing grub-legacy, and then reinstalling grub-pc without a reboot in between. When I initially installed grub-legacy it complained about reading the stage1 file, which was due to it deciding "root" was somewhere else, I figured giving grub-pc a second chance was simpler than hacking around in grub-legacy.
5) Have a really clean Lenny before the install! sysv-rc told me I couldn't have the dependency based start-up because I had not purged "exim4" when I installed postfix, and various other packages weren't purged. One to revisit sometime soon.
Once I got everything sorted Squeeze looks much the same so far. I see an oddity with the Icedove password store (but not Iceweasel), but haven't had a chance to check it out. A few apps look newer and shinier, some nice changes in GNOME, and a few icons look uglier.
Worth it? Well as a system admin I need the experience of upgrading. Everyone else is probably well advised to leave it till Squeeze is released.
Software RAID with LVM2 needs to be a core test case I suspect as it is pretty common now.
Don't ask me to choose something in debconf when there is only one of them to choose.
Comments on this Entry
If you can try replicate your system in a virtual machine first you can some times have a practice first without breaking your real systems. I've used Qemu/kqemu and VirtualBox OSE in the past with some success.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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One thing that did impress is just how robust Debian is. At various points in the upgrade I hit issues, but at every stage excluding the grub-pc issue, the machine was bootable, connected to the net, with Lynx, Irssi (and generally X and Iceweasel were working for most of the upgrade).
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
Fair enough, however if it's a server it's sometimes worth testing before you take the plunge. All the upgrades I've done from Sarge on have been okay - but that's not to say they have been perfect.
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
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Must learn more about aptitude, and dependency checking. In this upgrade libpango1.0-0 was one of the sticking blocks, and it was only manual removal that allowed a sensible automatic solution to be found.
On the upside this box did enabled the new boot sequence, so hopefully it'll be faster to boot.
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
I run testing on my desktop and have found the odd aptitude safe-upgrade on it problematic.
Overall I have more problems with a testing desktop than when I do a stable to stable upgrade. However I do get the benefits of a nearly new system all the time by running testing all the time. In theory SID would be better - in that it gets security fixes earlier but it also can break more often...
My servers and family computers all run stable and they are normally upgraded to the new stable only after a few weeks and one or two dry runs in a VM. The KDE3/KDE4 transition is probably going to be fun this time as it's a fairly radical change for my family - the technical changes such as GRUB they don't care about...!
--
"It's Not Magic, It's Work"
Adam
[ Parent | Reply to this comment ]
On the upside this box did enabled the new boot sequence, so hopefully it'll be faster to boot.Probably it'll be safer, not faster. The new insserv concept is all about granting a correct sequence, not an optimized one!
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