Comments on debtakeover

[Tony Lindgren <tony@atomide.com>]

Hi Guillem,

Thanks for the debtakeover script!

I converted a friend's rh-7.3 server to Debian testing last weekend, and had
some issues... Of course the server was at remote ISP, so I really should
have tested it on a local machine first :)

Sorry, I did not keep very accurate notes, but here are the main problems I
had:

The first problem I had was that the debootstrap needed ARCH specified in
order to download anything. I just modified debootstrap to do that to get
the files downloaded.

After that the install went pretty good, until I guess it got finished,
and ld-linux.so.2 could not be found. I got around that by cat
/lib/ld-2.3.2.so > /lib/ld-linux.so.2, and then had debian running. Then I
reinstalled some base packeges like libc6 to be sure had all the necessary
files.

However, the major problem I encountered was that after a reboot, the system
always went to single-user mode. I could not figure it out and did not want
to do remote reboots unnecessarily, so I tarred up the base root files and
ran them on my old laptop on a USB drive :)

Then I finally figured out what had gone wrong in the debtakeover script.
Here's the related part:

# msg "-> Converting halt to behave as reboot"
# rm /etc/rc0.d/S??halt
# cp -d /etc/rc6.d/S??reboot /etc/rc0.d
# mv -f /etc/rc1.d /etc/rc1.d.disabled
# ln -s /etc/rc2.d /etc/rc1.d

This will be a little time bomb if you reinstall some base packages, as
now anything in rc1.d will also go to rc2.d.

So when I was reinstalling some of the base packages, I had a symlink
for S20single both in /etc/rc1.d and /etc/rc2.d... And of course the system
would always go to single user mode in runlevel 2 as well. After removing
/etc/rc2.d/S20single the system booted just fine.

Don't know where that should be fixed, but just my 2c worth in case anybody
else is having similar problems :)

Cheers,

Tony