Debian wheezy

[ewx]

Notes from upgrading a couple of machines to Debian wheezy:

• Dovecot made quite a mess of upgrading itself and needed a lot of configuration file surgery. Fortunately not much had changed in a nonobvious way, things had just moved around and not captured the prior configuration.
• mediawiki needed some manual database surgery and running a script.
• mysql seems to have silently terminated at some point in the last 12 hours. I’ll see if it happens again.
• rpc.nfsd hung during the upgrade of nfs-kernel-server. I killed it, which unwedged the upgrade, and removed the package so I could proceed. Reinstalling after a reboot worked fine.
• Large chunks of /dev seem to have acquired a sticky bit, which causes swapon to complain (but not to fail). This seems to be a way for udev to record a single bit of information per device.
• PHP started emitting cron junk mail twice an hour until a removed package was purged.
• logrotate has got a bit pickier about permissions on /var/log.
• synaptic now seems to be confining its terminal output to a 31x3 character subwindow. I've not yet found an option to change this.
• snmpd's reporting of temperature sensors has randomly mutated, leading to even odd temperature graphs than usual until I spotted it.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

I've almost given up upgrading OSes. In theory it'll be fine, but XKCD is right time and time again. Debian/Ubuntu has a fantastic structure for managing upgrades, but even so it appears inevitable that something will go wrong, and go wrong badly.

Whenever I can, I time OS upgrades to coincide with hardware upgrades, installing the new OS on the new hardware and migrating. Even then you can bet something won't like my home directory's dot-files. )-8