Re: Server upgrade to wheezy failed
On Sat, 29 Sep 2012 16:05:43 -0400, Tom H wrote:
> On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 6:18 AM, Brian <ad44@cityscape.co.uk> wrote:
>> On Fri 28 Sep 2012 at 19:50:22 +0000, Hendrik Boom wrote:
>>>
>>> My server upgrade from squeeze to wheezy just failed. But I'm not
>>> panicking, I can still dual-boot into a back-up squeeze partition, and
>>> squeeze still works perfectly.
>>>
>>> I just upgraded my server from squeeze to wheezy. Lots of packages
>>> failed to upgrade because of dependency problems. Now it's normal to
>>> have a few like this in a testing system, as packages leak through
>>> from sid, so I wasn't too worried about this -- normally just wait a
>>> few days and the missing dependencies show up.
>>>
>>> But enough are missing that wheezy is not really usable.
>>>
>>> It fails to recognise any network interfaces. It used to recognise an
>>> eth0, an eth1, and a ppp0, but now ifconfig reports nothing. Of
>>> course, this might not even be the fault of the missing packages.
>>> Maybe udev is wrong. Yes, I started the upgrade with the kernel and
>>> udev. They should match.
>>>
>>> I'm not sure where to start looking.
>>>
>>> apt-get dist-upgrade just reports a lot of unresolved dependencies.
>>> I'm not clear what to do next. apt-get suggests using apt-get -f
>>> install. But which packages do I do this to? Or do I misunderstand?
>>
>> The idea is that 'apt-get -f install' by itself should sort out missing
>> dependencies for a package. It will first look in
>> /var/cache/apt/archives for them and next download from the mirror you
>> are using if they are not there. The latter looks like a problem for
>> you if there are no network interfaces :). You pobably should look at
>> this first and see what the kernel is getting up to. The output of
>> 'dmesg' after booting might help.
>
> Not necessarily helpful to the OP and more for the record for other
> upgraders:
>
> The wheezy release notes recommend:
> apt-get upgrade apt-get install linux-image-<version>
> apt-get install udev [reboot]
> apt-get dist-upgrade
>
> I'd start by checking what versions of the kernel and udev are currently
> installed and running because the squeeze kernel isn't compatible with
> the wheezy udev.
Yes. I figured that out. But I've discovered that at the [reboot] step
I managed to misbootd into the squeeze kernel with the wheezy udev, so
your analysis is dead on.
I had even installed the wheezy kernel (version 3.0.something), but even
so, I find myself unable to boot it, as described in another post in this
thread.
>
> Can the NIC(s) be brought up and the network enabled manually?
I don't know. It sounds like an idea. How does one do this?
>From a recent dmesg output, it looks as if the ethernet cards are
recognised, but they don't get so far as having devices eth0 or eth1
created for them. Details in that same other post.
I'm starting to think that the simplest solution might be to wipe the
wheezy partitions clean, copy in the squeeze partitions again, and do the
whole thing again, this time *not* rebooting when NFS doesn't work but
instead running apt-get -f install.
But it's still not clear how to solve the boot problems. It seems that
something -- the 'core'? the initrd? the intermediate bootloader stages?
are too big for the embedding area, also something about a cross-disk
boot. The boot drive of this system is *not* the drive the system
partitions are on. Evidently a cross-disk boot of squeeze works, bot one
for wheezy with the new kernel doesn't. I've tried grub on both systems
without success. I've tried lilo on the squeeze system. The only thing
still to try is running
lilo -v
on wheezy (still booted with the wrong kernel, of course, until I
actually get a bootloader to boot the right kernel).
-- hendrik
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