On 15. sep. 2014 18:50, Colin Watson wrote:
On Sun, Sep 14, 2014 at 04:40:14PM +0200, Adrien Clerc wrote:I'm in the category of people who installed their Debian 8 years ago, on an old AMD processor, only i686. My hardware was upgraded since, but the system remains. I've searched for cross-grade, but nothing serious comes out, except "reinstall everything". If you have some clear documentation (at least some steps, I'm curious enough to read some apt manuals), I think you can go on dropping i386 architecture.It can be done if you are competent and confident. I successfully crossgraded a production system from i386 to amd64 a while back, roughly following the steps from this blog post:
Lacking competence, dumb luck and stable power for ~48 hrs will also work :~ .
For production systems, cross-grade is still a bad idea, if only because you MUST plan for extended down-time, Cross-grade can be made to work on non-mission-critical boxes.
This message is proof of that. :->. dpkg has cross-grade working. apt can be pressed into use by "apt-get install --reinstall" .
Of course, if you do not use the appropriate tools for the job, you MUST have sufficient sed, awk and perl -fu.
I had grep failing for a while, which made some .debs uninstallable. A large cache of downloaded .debs helps. I was also happy that I remembered seeing some android phones using 8.8.8.8 for recursive DNS, I never paid attention to what my ISP gives out. Then network at home (apart from the phones) was out for a couple of hours until I got bind working again.
My system got a good rinse from it. Now there are hardly any packages from squeeze left, and the last SuSE 6.4 binaries got the boot :) (Now THAT was a truly painful transition, back in the day).
This guide http://www.ewan.cc/?q=node/90 looks quite safe. If I had followed it I guess the pain would have been less than my route. Minimum requirement for reducing hassle is to make sure your existing i386 packages are the same version as the amd64 you will be replacing them with. Barring that you need to forcibly purge the old and insert then new, while keeping a running system.
I also remembered about postgresql being fussy about bit-width too late, so I had to install a 32-bit chroot to get a fresh export from the entire install. Having a dump of the databases is well and good, but you ned the "roles" aswell. postgres-32-bit will NOT run on 64-bit libraries. RRD-databases are the same, so having a chroot ready for stuff like that is probably wise no matter how well you plan things.