Re: Improvement of headless server upgrades
On Tue, Mar 04, 2025 at 08:39:43PM -0500, Helmut K. C. Tessarek wrote:
> This is my first mail in a Debian mailing list and I hope I've chosen the
> correct one. There are way too many lists thus please direct me to the
> correct one, in case I messed up.
As the matter is intersecting multiple packages, it isn't the worst
choice.
> In the last few days I ran into a serious issue when upgrading to newer
> releases on 3 headless servers: the network connection went dead.
> In the first situation the interface name changed from eth0 to end0 and
> after the reboot my adapter got a link-local address.
I am surprised to see this happen. Back in older times, interfaces used
to be named like eth0, but that should not be happening since quite a
number of stable releases. Those old systems that still use eth0 today
tend to do it due to a file /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules.
Does that exist and list your interface on the affected system? If not,
can you try figuring out why it was still named eth0 before upgrading?
In principle, I expect that this is an unusual circumstance and
therefore do not think it is worth mitigating.
> In the second situation dhcpcd was replaced by Network Manager and once
> again the network was dead.
Can you try figuring out what dependency caused Network Manager to be
installed? Your apt or dpkg logs may be helpful here.
> Both network "outages" could have been prevented by adding a note at the end
> of the dist-upgrade output.
There are two difficulties in this proposal. One is finding a
responsible package for printing this note and the other is properly
detecting the changed network interface name before doing the reboot
that actually changes it.
As a result of these, I suggest investing time into making the described
situations less likely rather than printing a warning.
Helmut
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