Debian stable just updated. Usually when Debian drops a new “stable”, it means its bombproof as hell and tested out the wazoo. This time, I’m not so sure that is true.
First candidate is a virtualbox that I use to keep some client data on an encrypted partition and safer than just leaving it on my desktop machine.
First attempt threw some errors about problems with “default-jre” and “openjdk-6-jre”, but I don’t use java on this virtualbox so I just removed them.
Second attempt gave a huge problem because of some conflict between CPAN installed Perl modules in /usr/local/share/perl/5.10… and the new 5.14 modules. It seems to me that the installer should just remove /usr/local from the Perl paths and ignore any locally installed stuff.
I tried removing that directory manually, but by that time the install was so screwed up that I actually went back to a clone I’d made of the virtualbox and tried again. This time I removed the JRE stuff and moved /usr/local/share/perl out of the way. The upgrade went much more smoothly, except the screen goes totally blank for a long time during the upgrade, and when it’s done the reboot prompt is showing empty boxes instead of letters. Fortunately I guessed correctly as to which box was the “ok” button.
After it upgraded, I discovered that Postgres 8 was marked as deprecated, so I did a pg-dumpall, removed it, imported the dump into Postgres 9, and all was well, no problems. Then I had to get RT working again, so I used aptitude to install as many of the packages as I could that formerly had been in /usr/local/share/perl. The only one I couldn’t find a deb for was Plack::Handler::Starlet, so I let CPAN install it.
Once that was up and running to my satisfaction, I figured it was time to move on to my linode. The linode hosts my navaid.com databases and a bunch of mailman mailing lists, and not much else. Remembering the Postgres 8 to 9 thing, I made sure to pg-dumpall before I started. There were no files in any local perl directories, and no jre, so I was good to go.
As it was updating, I saw it removing the Postgres 8 version of postgis. Oh oh, I thought, that’s not good. I’ve discovered in the past that you can’t simply recreate a postgis database using a pg-dumpall dump. So after the upgrade, I of course tried to install postgis for PostgreSQL 9, and once again panicked as it dragged in a ton of X11 crap I don’t need. Then I tried and failed to do a restore of the dump file. What I ended up doing was
- creating the database user for that site
- creating the databases for that site
- running the scripts that come with postgis for creating the spatial functions
- coping the pg dump file, and cutting out anything related to other DBS, and cutting out the drop and creation of these DBS.
- running this cut down version of the dump file
- making another copy of the dump file that includes all the other DBS, including the drop and create commands and running it.
Everything seems to be running now.
Some time I’ve got to go on and upgrade my xen host and guest oses on my colo box, but I’m really reluctant to do that one because if something goes wrong, I’ll have to drive in and try to fix it while standing in a freezing cold server rack farm.