Debian Woody to Sarge

These are few notes on upgrading Debian woody to sarge.

general comments

It took 12hrs to dist-upgrade two servers in parallel. That included one of the server hot adding one of the HDs and rebuilding RAID, and lots of work to install from source and customize additional services. Hence, it does not, in any way, reflect the time needed to do the dist-upgrade. Especially given that servers are aging PIIs and compiling software takes a long time.

working around "apt-get dist-upgrade" strange behaviour

problem

When we did first apt-get dist-upgrade, perl, mysql-server, courier, and lots of associated libraries were to be REMOVED. That was completely unacceptable, since both perl and mysql are part of many service our servers provide. Such breakup of service would be unacceptable. Also, it didn't look like a distribution upgrade, more like distribution destroy and rebuild path.

solution

We looked at packges under the REMOVE section, pasted them all into an apt-get install command. Result was plenty of conflicts. However, as we removed few packages that we didn't desperately need, we were able to install packages that we needed, like perl, mysql, courier.

Once that was done, we run apt-get dist-upgrade, which then removed only few marginal packages.

crucial components configurations

raidtools2 / mdadm

Raidtools2 package has been taken out of Debian, mdadm replaces it. You will be asked qustions about mdadm, read them carefully, inspect your RAID setup, check your kernel options (it makes a different whether MD options are modules or in the kerner), and make sure you know what you're doing before giving answers to mdadm questions. For example, all our MD optins are compile in the kernel.

#
# Multi-device support (RAID and LVM)
#
CONFIG_MD=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_MD=y
CONFIG_MD_LINEAR=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID0=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID1=y
CONFIG_MD_RAID5=y
CONFIG_MD_MULTIPATH=y
CONFIG_BLK_DEV_LVM=y

lilo

we got two messages from lilo. first one was:

Deprecated files have been found on your system. You must update the 'install=' parameter
 in your LILO configuration file (/etc/lilo.conf) in order to properly upgrade the package.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              
The new 'install=' options are:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

     new: install=bmp                                                                                                                                                            
     old: install=/boot/boot-bmp.b  

     new: install=text                                                                                                                                                    
     old: install=/boot/boot-text.b                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

     new: install=menu                                                                                                                                                        
     old: install=/boot/boot-menu.b or boot.b

second one was about devfs option in lilo.conf

1. correct your lilo.conf and rerun it if you get the above message
2. if you run LVM, read /usr/share/doc/devfsd/README.Debian
   • we added append="devfs=mount" to our lilo image sections

new config files

Lots of config files come in slighty different formats. Each package will ask what do you want to do with it. Whenever in doubt, choose option D, which will show you diff between options, and review changes carefully. Needless to say, backup all your important data and config files before doing any upgrades on this scale.

-- ToniPrug - 03 Jul 2005
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