On 2011-03-07 10:42:27 Toni S wrote: >Hi folks, > >I have lenny running on a headless virtual server being hosted by a >small hosting provider and now I'd like to upgrade to squeeze. > >In case of any service failures after doing 'sudo aptitude safe- >upgrade' I'd like to know some methods to smoothly revert to my >current installation. >Best would probably be to ask my hosting provider to make a disk >snapshot / disk image, but I'd like to know if there are other >possibilities. What's your experience? Did you try out something of >these: Taking a full backup is recommended by the release notes, and that is the way I did it on the VPSes I administrate. >- Using undo mechanism of aptitude (how does this work?) Aptitude has undo? >- using 'dpkg-get-selections >currentstate.txt' and 'dpkg-set- >selections <currentstate.txt That doesn't actually perform a downgrade. You'll have to follow it with an (apt-get install). Also, it doesn't restore your debonf database nor your APT extended status database (which packages are marked as auto-installed). >- making a tar backup and restore it afterwards while the system is >running, then reboot? At the very least, shut down everything that's not required for the restore. But, that could work well. It won't clean up newly created files though. >- making small incremental upgrades of individual packages with >aptitude instead of upgrading all packages at once / test the new >service / revert to old version if necessary This is a good way to go. After testing freezes I tend to do this on my desktop and laptop as time permits. >What's your recommendation / experience for downgrade? Don't do them. Take backups and restore from them if possible. Either that or soldier through the issues with the new version(s) and get them working "enough". The upgrade didn't take me 12 hours on any system, at least not all at once. There were a couple of short clean-up sessions over the next 2 days, but nothing critical. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. bss@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/ \_/
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