Upgrading our News Server from Debian 1.1 to 1.2
I tried to upgrade one of our major servers to 1.2. In the past weeks I
have set up some other servers using Debian 1.2 which worked ok with just
a few bugs.
I was not very sure if this would work. So the first thing I did more than
a week ago was upgrade libc and NIS on the system and see how things
developed. Most packages worked except the netdiag package also needed
upgrading since it started to segfault. It worked fine for a week.
Then last week I decided to give it a try to do the upgrade.
I ran dselect and got a huge list of packages to be upgraded. First time I
gave up because I was scared when I saw the list of packages to be
upgraded... Our News Server, External DNS Server, FTP Site, LocalTalk
Archive, Library Router and a Literature Database are on that
machine.
After giving it some thought and thinking how some other workstations seem
to do just fine I tried it again. I telnetted into the system from home
(no keyboard + monitor on those servers...) and ran the installation and
it started unpacking package after package for a long time until the
telnet connection suddenly died. All attempts to ping the system from
remote failed and so I gave up.
(Sorry our debian mirror was down last weekend ...)
Monday I came back to the campus and tried to fix the machine. The screen
showed the bootup contents and hung. After pressing reset the system came
up again and failed fsck. It probably died running under full load.
I ran fsck manually on all partitions and hoped for the best. And the
system really came up fine again. A huge list of unconfigured packages.
Most could be configured with
dpkg --configure --pending
Some only configured after reinstalling them (netatalk for example).
I got some errormessages since some of the essential files
/etc/services
/etc/group
/etc/passwd
which are all customized for our setup were not automatically updated with
new entries. I think we should have some scripts for these.
I fixed those things manually and the system was fine. I saw that Miquel
had released inn 1.5 so I got it from master and installed it too.
(1.5 fixes the constant clobbering of the active file I think).
Then came a huge surprise because suddenly the directories /var/lib/news
and /var/spool/news vanished! Dpkg said something about removing those
directories?
Fortunately these were symlinks rather than real directories and after the
first shock I was able to simply reinstate the symlinks and have a working
newsserver again (Which failed later since the INN of debian does not do
proper recovery by renumbering after a crash ... but that is another
story).
I think I could not have done this easy upgrade / recovery with other
Distributions. And even though we had some downtime it was worse when we
used to run Slackware and did all upgrades automatically. I dont know how
RedHat would behave in a similar situation.
I am still not sure what caused the crash and I surely would like to have
some way of checking the integrity of the files on the server now.
The issue with the delayed configuration is especially worrysome for
important functionality like the netstd package. When netstd is unpacked
but not configured then all inetd functionality is essentially gone.
The telnet sesssion continues but that is it. Also other daemon services
are interrupted for as long as it takes to upgrade.
This is unacceptable for a server in high load. Downtime for daemons needs
to be minimized and that means immediate configuration.
Upgrading packages with dpkg on our serves has often worked fine and I
think that was due to the immediate configuration with minimal downtime.
Debian claims to be able to update a running system and that was one
of the reasons I choose Debian for our Campus Network. I think we should
work on that issue that the upgradability even for critical systems comes
true. I think Debian is much better than other distributions in that
aspect but lets make it even better.
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