Re: Upgrading our News Server from Debian 1.1 to 1.2
According to Christoph Lameter:
> 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?
Yes, those directories were part of inn-1.4unoff4 but not of inn-1.5.
Normally this shouldn't be a problem, as those directories are not empty.
And even if they were symlinks, a "rmdir" on them would fail. However dpkg
probably doesn't know if the last part of a pathname in its installed
files database is a file or a directory, so it probably tries both
unlink() and rmdir() on it (just a guess).
> 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
They were removed _because_ they were symlinks. But you are right, in
your particular setup this is a problem. But I don't really know what to
do about this. Ideas?
> (Which failed later since the INN of debian does not do
> proper recovery by renumbering after a crash ... but that is another
> story).
Because /var/run is cleaned on bootup - all old pid files are removed.
Some other packages have some problems starting at boot otherwise. It
_can_ happen that sendmail.pid leftover from a previous boot has the
PID of another daemon that was installed later but started earlier
in the boot process.
However there is a special exception in the /etc/init.d/boot script of
sysvinit-2.69 that skips the file "innd.pid" when cleaning up /var/run.
Perhaps the pid file should go into /var/lib/news in this special case.
> 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.
Well I upgraded our NNRP news server last week from a non-debian, home
built a.out system to a full Debian 1.2 system by carefully installing
all parts of Debian on it by hand (with dpkg and lots of override
switches). The only thing I didn't replace at that time were the
news server binaries so that the server kept it's 40 day uptime while
_all_ a.out binaries on the system (except those in /usr/lib/news)
were deleted from it :)
Mike.
--
Miquel van | Cistron Internet Services -- Alphen aan den Rijn.
Smoorenburg, | mailto:info@cistron.nl http://www.cistron.nl/
miquels@cistron.nl | Our vision is to speed up time, eventually eliminating it.
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