Debian lenny → unstable

[ewx]

I upgraded a Debian lenny system to unstable. I ran into various issues:

Incompatibility between udev and the kernel

Unstable’s udev hates lenny’s kernel, and abruptly terminates the upgrade (#571255). This was a nasty situation to recover from. Since I was already half-upgraded I upgraded everything except udev (and hal, which depended on it) and then rebooted into the new kernel before sorting out udev and hal.

A better answer would probably be to upgrade just the kernel first and reboot into that before upgrading anything else. (Perhaps using the backports kernel? I haven’t tried this though.)

Grub 2 Migration

The Grub → Grub 2 migration worked except that it didn’t migrate the bootloader serial console configuration (#545426). This was easy to fix by hand once I’d located some documentation (ignore the “1.98”, that’s just there to confuse you, it’s really the Grub 2 documentation).

With the important bits in bold:

$ cat /etc/default/grub
# If you change this file, run 'update-grub' afterwards to update
# /boot/grub/grub.cfg.

GRUB_DEFAULT=0
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=`lsb_release -i -s 2> /dev/null || echo Debian`
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=""
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="console=ttyS1,115200n8"

# Uncomment to enable BadRAM filtering, modify to suit your needs
# This works with Linux (no patch required) and with any kernel that obtains
# the memory map information from GRUB (GNU Mach, kernel of FreeBSD ...)
#GRUB_BADRAM="0x01234567,0xfefefefe,0x89abcdef,0xefefefef"

# Uncomment to disable graphical terminal (grub-pc only)
#GRUB_TERMINAL=console
GRUB_TERMINAL="serial console"
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND="serial --unit=1 --speed=115200"

# The resolution used on graphical terminal
# note that you can use only modes which your graphic card supports via VBE
# you can see them in real GRUB with the command `vbeinfo'
#GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480

# Uncomment if you don't want GRUB to pass "root=UUID=xxx" parameter to Linux
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_UUID=true

# Uncomment to disable generation of recovery mode menu entries
#GRUB_DISABLE_LINUX_RECOVERY="true"

# Uncomment to get a beep at grub start
#GRUB_INIT_TUNE="480 440 1"

(I use /dev/ttyS1, i.e. COM2, on this machine; if you want /dev/ttyS0, i.e. COM1, use --unit=0.)

Note that it did migrate the kernel option to use a serial console.

sysv-rc migration

sysv-rc produced a long list of files that meant it couldn’t migrate to dependenct-based startup. They were either local inventions or leftovers from ancient versions of Debian (one was timestamped 1995) and all were obsolete and could be deleted.

The system still booted after this migration was completed.

snmpd migration

snmpd has changed its configuration file substantially (so I threw the old one away and started again), and you have to additionally install snmp-mibs-downloader and configure it to use it properly. A Suggests: or Recommends: would have been nice.

# cat snmp.conf
#
# As the snmp packages come without MIB files due to license reasons, loading
# of MIBs is disabled by default. If you added the MIBs you can reenable
# loading them by commenting out the following line.
mibs /usr/share/mibs/ietf/SNMPv2-MIB:/usr/share/mibs/ietf/ENTITY-MIB:
/usr/share/mibs/netsnmp/UCD-SNMP-MIB:/usr/share/mibs/netsnmp/LM-SENSORS-MIB

(NB. All on one line - only broken here for reading convenience.)

# cat /etc/default/snmpd
# This file controls the activity of snmpd and snmptrapd

# Don’t load any MIBs by default.
# You might comment this lines once you have the MIBs downloaded.
#export MIBS=

# snmpd control (yes means start daemon).
SNMPDRUN=yes

# snmpd options (use syslog, close stdin/out/err).
SNMPDOPTS=’-Lsd -Lf /dev/null -u snmp -g snmp -I -smux -p /var/run/snmpd.pid’

# snmptrapd control (yes means start daemon).  As of net-snmp version
# 5.0, master agentx support must be enabled in snmpd before snmptrapd
# can be run.  See snmpd.conf(5) for how to do this.
TRAPDRUN=no

# snmptrapd options (use syslog).
TRAPDOPTS=’-Lsd -p /var/run/snmptrapd.pid’

# create symlink on Debian legacy location to official RFC path
SNMPDCOMPAT=yes

(I have long thought that SNMP is ridiculously full of complicated nonsense if you all you wanted was to move a few numbers about network and disk usage around, and this reinforces this belief…)

Comments

[pne.livejournal.com]

(I use /dev/ttyS1, i.e. COM2, on this machine; if you want /dev/ttyS0, i.e. COM2, use --unit=0.)

Do you mean "/dev/ttyS0, i.e. COM1"?

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Yes, well spotted, thankyou. Fixed.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

Some of your HTML is showing

[ewx.livejournal.com]

fixed, ta.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

"As the snmp packages come without MIB files due to license reasons"

Let me guess, the MIBs have been declared non-free as they are covered by a license that doesn't permit redistribution of modified versions? This is the "let's saw Debian off at the knees through license pedantry" group at it again, isn't it.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

#498475 (http://bugs.debian.org/498475) seems to be the nearest you'll get to documentation. The current situation is that snmp-mibs-downloader is in non-free and contains the RFCs that it extracts the MIBs from.

So it all works in the end, and AFAIK doesn't actually depend on downloading anything, but it requires badly documented user intervention before you get a usable system.

[3c66b.livejournal.com]

Was wondering whether to give this a try; I guess I'll wait a bit...