Entries tagged jessie

Recently I build a new desktop system. The hightlights of the hardware are a pair of 512Gb SSDs, which were to be configured in software RAID for additional speed and reliability (I'm paranoid that they'd suddenly stop working one day). From power-on to the (GNOME) login-prompt takes approximately 10 seconds.

I had to fight with the Debian installer to get the beast working though as only the Jessie Beta 2 installer would recognize the SSDs, which are Crucual MX100 devices. My local PXE-setup which deploys the daily testing installer, and the wheezy installer, both failed to recognize the drives at all.

The biggest pain was installing grub on the devices. I think this was mostly this was due to UFI things I didn't understand. I created spare partitions for it, and messaged around with grub-ufi, but ultimately disabled as much of the "fancy modern stuff" as I could in the BIOS, leaving me with AHCI for the SATA SSDs, and then things worked pretty well. After working through the installer about seven times I also simplified things by partitioning and installing on only a single drive, and only configured the RAID once I had a bootable and working system.

(If you've never done that it's pretty fun. Install on one drive. Ignore the other. Then configure the second drive as part of a RAID array, but mark the other half as missing/failed/dead. Once you've done that you can create filesystems on the various /dev/mdX devices, rsync the data across, and once you boot from the system with root=/dev/md2 you can add the first drive as the missing half. Do it patiently and carefully and it'll just work :)

There were some niggles though:

• Jessie didn't give me the option of the gnome desktop I know/love. So I had to install gnome-session-fallback. I also had to mess around with ~/.config/autostart because the gnome-session-properties command (which should let you tweak the auto-starting applications) doesn't exist anymore.

• Setting up custom keyboard-shortcuts doesn't seem to work.

• I had to use gnome-tweak-tool to get icons, etc, on my desktop.

Because I assume the SSDs will just die at some point, and probably both on the same day, I installed and configured obnam to run backups. There is more testing and similar, but this is the core of my backup script:

#!/bin/sh

# backup "/" - minus some exceptions.
obnam backup -r /media/backups/storage --exclude=/proc --exclude=/sys --exclude=/dev --exclude=/media /

# keep files for various periods
obnam forget --keep="30d,8w,8m" --repository /media/backups/storage

Tags: debian, desktop, jessie, ssd, systemd | 9 comments

Today I upgraded my main web-host to the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux.

I performed the upgraded by changing wheezy to jessie in the sources.list file, then ran:

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

For some reason this didn't upgrade my kernel, which remained the 3.2.x version. That failed to boot, due to some udev/systemd issues (lots of "waiting for job: udev /dev/vda", etc, etc). To fix this I logged into my KVM-host, chrooted into the disk image (which I mounted via the use of kpartx), and installed the 3.16.x kernel, before rebooting into that.

All my websites seemed to be OK, but I made some changes regardless. (This was mostly for "neatness", using Debian packages instead of gems, and installing the attic package rather than keeping the source-install I'd made to /opt/attic.)

The only surprise was the significant upgrade of the Net::DNS perl-module. Nothing that a few minutes work didn't fix.

Now that I've upgraded the SSL-issue I had with redirections is no longer present. So it was a worthwhile thing to do.

Tags: debian, jessie | No comments

This weekend has been all about migrations:

Host Migrations

I've migrated several more systems to the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux. No major surprises, and now I'm in a good state.

I have 18 hosts, and now 16 of them are running Jessie. One of them I won't touch for a while, and the other is a KVM-host which runs about 8 guests - so I won't upgraded that for a while (because I want to schedule the shutdown of the guests for the host-reboot).

Password Migrations

I've started migrating my passwords to pass, which is a simple shell wrapper around GPG. I generated a new password-managing key, and started migrating the passwords.

I dislike that account-names are stored in plaintext, but that seems known and unlikely to be fixed.

I've "solved" the problem by dividing all my accounts into "Those that I wish to disclose post-death" (i.e. "banking", "amazon", "facebook", etc, etc), and those that are "never to be shared". The former are migrating, the latter are not.

(Yeah I'm thinking about estates at the moment, near-death things have that effect!)

Tags: debian, jessie, passwords | No comments