Upgrading to Sarge, at last
I 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 ;-)