I have a bunch of stuff running on a Virtual Private Server at a company called Linode. This instance first spooled up with Debian 5 was “stable”, and it’s currently running Debian 10. The only problem is that Debian 10 isn’t supported any more, and Debian 13 is now “stable”. At this point, I have two options:
- I could upgrade incrementally from 10 to 11, 11 to 12, and 12 to 13, fixing all the problems that occur along the way or
- I could do what the Linode tech support people have been begging me to do for a number of years, and spool up a new instance of Debian 13, and just transfer things one at a time to it.
I’m currently leaning towards the second option, but for two problems:
- I would need to migrate my news spool. Last time I did that (I’m guessing sometime around 2010 or so?) I had to rebuild my overview database, which wasn’t a big deal, just that everything was kind of broken until I figured out how to do that. Also this time I’m using a new type of news spool, called a “timeCAF”. Don’t ask me what it means, I don’t recall. Only that the old way was one file for each article in each newsgroup, and this way makes files that contain multiple articles, and may or may not be “sparse” in the Linux definition of that. Which might complicate the move. I can’t seem to find any information on that yet, but I’m still looking.
- The new Debian stable only has Mailman 3. I am currently running Mailman 2. I found a document about migrating from 2 to 3, but I think you need a computer with both installed, so I’m probably going to have to install the other one from source on one server or the other. My thought is that it’s probably better to upgrade on the old one so I don’t have to bring over any Mailman 2 cruft to the new server.
Other than that, I don’t anticipate any major trauma, just a lot of futzing around. I’ve done these upgrades in the past, and it’s usually been mostly a half a day of finding all the .dpkg-dist, .dpkg-old, and .dpkg-new files and diffing them with the corresponding config file and making whatever changes seem appropriate.