Lenny to squeeze [i really suck at debian dist upgrades].

not this lenny

squeeze apparently

Lenny was the prior version of Debian, so squeeze is the latest and i know both work (my blog), Anyhow apart from the film reference which i have never seen (young apes are not that impressed with cinema) so i never seen them.

So getting from one version to another in debian is where Bananas sucks, yes i have done it successfully from install but on core important things i always seem to end up installing as new rather than upgrading, in fact bananas is not your monkey for major debian upgrades, and had this trouble with fedora in the past.

So – having read the notes, and backed up the important stuff (just in case what i know will happen does) i clean up and check for rogue things.  Libcairo** is lennys bitch this time, and that essentially kills x,and about everything else, hey at least they wont be upgraded.

Another problem is with altermime something is apt hates the word filter, and if you know and read the documentation of altermime you know that filter is a word used.

So then as half the things of init.d are boldly gone to /dev/null as a result of and no x it complains about said errors and finishes then i think my numero uno mistake was with pata* Things don’t look good when I restart the process to be told ssh can be upgraded, I then have a serous fucked up debian box to fix, just as i expected.

Time to reinstall from scratch., hours pass…… i water some indoor plaints as well nothing else can be done.  Time passes s l o w e l y in hour units and the box is still sick, armed with cd of compressed data networking has changed (hours later) as what was eth0 is now eth1, eth1 is eth2 and eth2 became eth0, add a firewall rules to change into that mix and hours or weird fun was had by bananas.

Good news is pata was not the issue, So lets go blame the network device name change instead.

Debian package manager is also having a funny five minutes.  it appears it has nanny deb has a know it best attitude (new with rc2 cd). i cannot even delete debian games with gdm3, remove gdm3 you then can delete the crap of gnome games, after dire warnings from nanny deb about not being able to play nibbles any more she calms down.

This alien is a bit of a madam and in a day of ‘troubleshooting’ that number changing Ethernet card i generated a 170 page logfile report full of kernel reports  Nice for a days ‘work’.

Cascading the network change made everything else not want to work firewall/email, and postfix is in seventh level of hell for some odd reason.  Needless to say this isn’t fun. Later on its time to reimplement postfix after all it seems it wont even send email to a local user from a cron job..  Martians expecting email from the monkey house better wait.

Its not all doom and destructive special effects in this science fiction tale of squeeze Armageddon  , the large mail store works along with files.  So its not like everything broke, just most of it.

Anyhow the weirdness continues with cyrus imap deliver.db, and the services file in postfix denying the port 24 exists, I like doing things twice once in /etc/services and again in var spool.

Clamd got subdivided yet again, then i had to install a dns server to do dns lookups.

Its not all doom, i replaced postgrey with bley [an improvement], some things like dkim where packages and did not need to be compiled but figured out.  Altermime got a very small change from -i -oi on the documentation.

I dumped amavis and clamd and altermime in the end, but i appear to have a working system again.  Console font is still not right though on a old philips crt, one day i will get back that vga=791 lenny look in console font  I am very glad i made a backup of the important bits before disaster struck.

A question of would i have had the problems with another disto, or even paid support, paid support has its faults i read that headers is broken in one of those meaning that you cannot compile hardware drivers so i do not begrudge the botched update and be able to compile things

Final thought. Glad i upgraded, but a bit hit and miss in process.

 

How was your week

* read the notes ** some tinpot dictator perhaps