Etch to Lenny
Server Howtos
If you have done a few Etch to Lenny in place upgrades then you will know this isnt entirely straight forward. My most recent upgrade was a production VPS, and i jot a few notes below...
Do the usual things, full backup, change your apt sources.list then
aptitude update
At this point new apt source integrity checksum issues surface. Errors like:
W: GPG error: http://ftp.nz.debian.org lenny Release: The following signatures couldn`t be verified ... etc
The way i resolved this was to manually update the keys using
apt-key update
Then its recomended to first upgrade apt, although ive havent always done this:
aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
Finally, lenny has changed the upgrade syntax from dist-upgrade to full-upgrade:
aptitude full-upgrade
For me the upgrade went OK except:
- sarge-etch used to tell you to reboot to bring the new kernal in. Etch to lenny doesnt, it just stops. But a reboot, then another full-upgrade does download and install more stuff. I think i did three reboots altogether, before it looked finished.
- in my case three packages gave `what-to-do-about` type dialogs. ttysecure, dovecot and apache. All three revolved around updated config file syntax. This is a quandary, because on a production box, you need your old config customisations, but you also probably need the new config for the new package. One of the options it gives you is D to view the differences. In two of the cases the differences were significant. I accepted the new config for dovecot and ttysecure, but chose to keep my apache config. See more below. You made a full backup before the upgrade right? So manually edit dovecot to add back in your tweaks to the new file.
Viirtual hosts issues*
However with apache a few changes in the way things are done in lenny prevented apache starting.
1. latest apache has a default VirtualHost entry in
/etc/apache2/ports.conf
So if you have an existing /etc/apache2/conf.d/virtual.conf delete it.
Presence of the duplicate results in virtual host errors.
2. VirtualHost directives now must have a port number
eg
NameVirtualHost *:80
<virtualhost *:80>
In frustration i decided to start again with apache:
apt-get --purge remove apache2 apache2-common
mv /etc/apache2 /etc/apache2-etch
aptitude install apache2 libapache2-mod-php5 php5-mysql php5-gd
Then copied over my old virtual host config, then fixed the virtual host issues, a2ensite`d all the hosts, and it was then good to go. Note that youll have to go back and copy any apache conf tweaks you had like keepalivetimeout, max-keepaliverequest and timeout.
