Rather than waiting for a few months, as I typically do, I decided to be brave and upgrade my main virtual machine from Lenny to Squeeze. That host runs QPSMTPD, Apache, thttpd, and my blogspam server; nothing too complex or atypical.
The upgrade was mostly painless; I was interrupted several times by debconf asking me if I wished to replace configuration files I'd modified, but otherwise there were only two significant messages in the process:
- crm114
crm114 warned me that its spam database and/or configuration files had changed and would most likely result in brokenness, post-upgrade, and I should do something to stop avoiding lost mail.
Happily this was expected.
- sysv-rc
It transpired I had a couple of local init scripts which didn't have dependency information succesfully encoded into them; so I couldn't migrate to dependency-based bootup.
Given that this server gets a reboot maybe once every six months that wasn't really worth telling me about; but nevermind. No harm done.
That aside there were no major surprises; all services seemed to start normally and my use of locally-compiled backports meant that custom services largely upgraded in a clean fashion. The only exception was my patched copy of mutt which was replaced unexpectedly. That meant my lovely mutt-sidebar was horribly full of mailboxes, rather than showing only new messages. I created a hasty backported mutt package for Squeeze and made it available. (This patch a) enables the side-bar, and b) allows you to toggle between the display of all mailboxes and those with only new mail in them. It is buggy if you're using IMAP; but works for me. I would not choose to live without it.)
Now that I've had a quick scan over the machine the only other significant change was an upgrade of the mercurial revision control system, the updated templates broke my custom look & feel and also required some Apache mod_rewrite updates to allow simple clones via HTTP. (e.g. "hg clone http://asql.repository.steve.org.uk/").
So in conclusion:
- The upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze (i386) worked well.
- Before you begin running "iptables -I INPUT -p tcp --dport 25 -j REJECT" will avoid some potential surprises
- There are probably other services worth neutering, but I tend to only do this for SMTP.
- Keeping notes of updated template files will be useful if you make such system-wide changes. (e.g. hgwebdir templates)
ObQuote - "Hmm, upgrades " - The Matrix Reloaded (shudder).
Tags: debian, lenny, mutt, squeeze 2 comments
http://www.steve.org.uk/
Of course once I woke up this morning I discovered two problems:
The reason for this was a custom cronjob which was designed to stop the thttpd servers I use, process the logfiles, and then restart thttpd.
Because the default shell changed from bash to dash for the local user the script failed part-way through and left thttpd dead.
I use my slaughter system administration tool to configure things on my machines - think of it as CFEngine-lite if you wish.
Anyway it didn't have a way of differentiating between "lenny" and "squeeze" and replaced a few files with the defaults. I made a new release of slaughter last night; but failed to deploy it. Ooops.
Otherwise everything appears to be working well.