Upgrading to Sarge, at last
Sunday, June 26th, 2005I upgraded my gateway from Woody to Sarge right after the release, and all went fine on the Debian side. Switching to the 2.6 kernel, while I was at it, has been a bit painful as Linux 2.6 decided it wouldn’t order its network interfaces the same way Linux 2.4 did. I admit that I forgot about that before doing the upgrade.
This week-end, I finally found the time to upgrade my server, and this was a much feared upgrade, as I expected it would take me a whole day to be done with it. It all went rather fine, and I did the whole upgrade in half a day only.
The problems I anticipated were:
- Switching from Netsaint to Nagios: went fine, as I prepared the Nagios config on a test machine before the upgrade.
- INN: it just can’t survive an upgrade. Only a couple of minor fixes to inn.conf were needed to get it back up and running — good surprise.
- NUT: new major version, although I was running a backported version of NUT and no configuration changes were required. But nut-cgi failed to upgrade properly, I had to purge and reinstall it.
- Postfix/Courier-imap: this is my MX, so, if something goes wrong here, my mail doesn’t arrive anymore. And I absolutely HATE losing mail.
Once everything was back up and running, I switched from Apache to Apache2, then switched to Linux 2.6. The server is much faster now (even with Linux 2.4); especially, deleting mail from my IMAP folders now takes less than a second, where it could take as much as 20 seconds before. Happy I am.
In the end, Debian is still Debian, the upgrades are still painless compared to other distributions, and I love that. Now, if only services could get restarted faster during the upgrade, I’d be even more happy. For now, it’ll do ;-)