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Bug#695378: marked as done (upgrade from squeeze to wheezy almost successful.)

Your message dated Mon, 24 Nov 2014 13:01:49 +0100
with message-id <201411241301.51031.holger@layer-acht.org>
and subject line closing squeeze-wheezy upgrade report from within the wheezy release cycle
has caused the Debian Bug report #695378,
regarding upgrade from squeeze to wheezy almost successful.
to be marked as done.

This means that you claim that the problem has been dealt with.
If this is not the case it is now your responsibility to reopen the
Bug report if necessary, and/or fix the problem forthwith.

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-- 
695378: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=695378
Debian Bug Tracking System
Contact owner@bugs.debian.org with problems
--- Begin Message --- 
Package: upgrade-reports
Severity: important
Tags: wheezy

Upgrading 64-but squeeze to 64-bit wheezy on a AMD-64.  /boot is (now) 
on an ordinary partition, and / is on LVM on RAID.


I started with this upgrade from squeeze to wheezy a few weeks ago.  It 
has been only partially successful, and the resulting system is not yet 
ready to take the place of squeeze on my server.  As it stands now, 
wheezy will not boot properly without manual intervention, and one 
critical applicaiton (gnucash) will not run at all.

Fortunately, I still have a running copy of squeeze on my system, so the 
failed upgrade has little effect on day-to-day operation.

This is my second attempt to upgrade from squeeze to wheezy.  (The first 
was a  comedy of errors, mostly mine.)


----------------------------------------
What is wrong when I boot the new system
----------------------------------------

When I boot wheezy, it stops with  an initramfs prompt, having waited 
unsuccessfuly for the root file system.  Now the root file system is on 
LVM on RAID.  Presumably the LVM did not get activated properly after 
the RAID is discovered (I say some discussion of this on an archlinux 
bulletin board).  The workaround is manual intervention, namely, issuing 
the command
     vgchange -a  y
at the initramfs prompt.  It replies,

9 logical volume(s) in volume group "VG1" now active.

I close the shell with  control-D, and booting proceeds.

Until it starts to start up gdm.  X starts up, and I get a warning popup 
telling me
   There was an error loading the theme spacefun.  Couldn't recognize 
the image format for file 
'/usr/share/gdm/themes/debian-spacefun/boundingbox.png

I click OK; then am told

There was an error loading the theme, and the default theme could not be 
loaded.  Attempting to start toe standard greeter.

I click OK.  The standard greeter works fine.

--------------------------------------
What's wrong after the successful boot
--------------------------------------

First of all, networking is down.  The usual start scripts have indeed 
been run from rc.local, but they failed.  But manual intervention seems 
to help.  ifconfig tells me there are no interfaces, which is probably 
why setting up masquerading fails.  As root, I can issue

   ifconfig eth0 up
   ifconfig eth1 up

and these interfaces come up nicely.  Then I can run the usual local 
start scripts and they work properly.

So the problem seems to be that eth0 and eth1 somehos missed the boat 
and have nut been started automatically.

Also, the dhcp server isn't working.  How do I manually restart it?

----------------------
User software troubles
----------------------

User problems are probably caused by the large number of broken packages 
and when that gets resolved this set of problems will probably vanish.  
But just for completeness I'll describe the symptoms.

I log in as a user and start my usual icewm.

A lot of the boxes in the toolbar are univorm grey.  These are the ones 
that I would click on to get 'favorite applications', 'show Desktop', 
'Window Lit Menu', 'xterm', and 'WWW'.  I can identify them by using the 
text that show up when I hover the nouse pointer over them.  All that 
textt, and the actual text in the menus shows up fine.

The '1', '2', '3', and '4' to indicate alternate workspaces look just 
fine.

Starting an xterm using the box that usually has the terminal icon gives 
me nothing.
But I can get a terminal with and extremely small font through the menu.  
(blank) -> programs -> applicatinons -: Terminal Emulator -> Xterm.  
THis is presumably toe ancient xterm that comes with X.

Trying to run gnucash from this sams set of menus fails, wit a large 
warning box:

Cannot find default values.  The configuration data used to specify 
default vaues for gnucash cannot be found n the default system 
locations.  Without the data gnucash will still operate properly but it 
may require some extra time to set up.  Do yu wish to set the 
configuration data?

THen

An error occurred while loading or saving configuration informatino for 
gnucash.  Some of your configuraito settings may not work properly.

I can click on Details and get nothing.
I can click on OK and also get nothing.

Asking it to go ahead and set defaults doesn't help.


----------------
Upgrade history.
----------------

I upgraded starting with a copy of the running squeeze system.  I 
performed tha various checks in the release notes, did the minimal 
upgrade and the kernel upgrade.  When the time came to reboot I found 
that it wouldn't.  It took me a week to establish bootability of the 
wheezy partition.  The problems I ran into were:

* The configuration file for lilo was wrong -- my  fault.  A disk drive 
I had booted from long ago wasn't there any more (it's gone to the 
graveyard of aging hard drives) and there was still a stanza referring 
to it.  I had last run lilo when it was present.  Running it during the 
upgrade failed: lilo won't accept stanzas that refer to unmounted stuff.

* The configuration file for grub was also wrong.  I normally boot using 
lilo from floppy, and the grub bootconfiguration had never been tested. 

* Although I eventually discovered that wheezy's lilo had no trouble 
booting the new 3.* series kernels, squeeze's lilo wouldn't do it.  
Something about the something-area not being large enough.  And 
unfortunately, it was squeeze's lilo that I had to work with.

* But squeeze's grub was up to the task,  It took a while to hand-edit 
the grub.config file to get it to behave, but that was how I eventually 
got the half-upgraded wheezy booted.

After that, apt-get upgraded lots and lots of packages, but not all of 
them.  Many of the failed packages seem to be related to gnome.

I tried apt-get -f.  It gets stuck:

Could note perform immediate configuration on phonon-backend-vlc.  
Please see man 5 apt.conf under apt::Immediate-Configuration for details 
(2)

Unfortulately I could not find any such section in the output from man 5 
apt.conf.  Not sure how to proceed now.  MAybe the message shoudl be 
changed.  Many the man page for apt.conf should be changed.  Or maybe 
this is another thing that didn't get upgraded properly yet.

I tried letting aptitude have a look.  It wanted to delete over a 
hundred packages before it would do anything, including some that I 
regularly use.  I declined.
 
I tried again a week later.  Sometimes new packages show up in testing 
abd break these logjams.  But not this time.

 *******

I can provide the logs resulting from my attempts to upgrade if you 
would find them useful.  They're rather large.  I don't *think* they 
contain seriously confidential data, but unless it's essential I'd 
rather not post them on the web permanently for all to see.

-- hendrik@topoi.pooq.com

--- End Message ---
--- Begin Message --- 
Hi Hendrik,

thanks for your upgrade-report. I'm sure it was read at the time and I'm sorry 
you didn't get an earlier reply... now I'm closing it for three reasons:

- gnucash in wheezy works
- your report was done at a time when wheezy was not released yet, so the 
issues are not really reproducible anyway anymore. (unless with a huuuuge 
amount of work via snapshot.d.o....)
- I'm not convinced your partial upgrade steps with reboot inbetween are 
supported like this. I'd recommend to upgrade everything before doing the 
reboot...


cheers,
	Holger

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