Ubuntu feisty server upgrade
So I tried upgrading two of our servers tonight from Ubuntu edgy to feisty.
I’m a seat-of-the-pants kinda guy, so I upgraded in-place, over a SSH connection. The only thing I did that was slightly sane was I firewalled off our webservices and email servers during the upgrade, that way if I broke anything, the big wide interweb wouldn’t see it broken (they’d just not be able to access the site at all).
Both upgrades were a partial failure. The firewall ran into major problems, I suspect with the init upgrade, init seemed to have run into a problem. The process was there (showing init –restart as its process name), but it didn’t reap any zombies. I had to hard restart the system (reboot -f) to get it to restart, but I’ll admit it came up cleanly. Well, Ubuntu’s side of things came up cleanly.
I found that I’ve modified the firewall quite a bit when it comes to routing an IPv6 stuff, and I was naughty and hadn’t saved all those settings into config files, boot scripts, etc.
This is actually a good thing, as I am planning to blog my entire IPv6 setup, which I feel is rather unique. So now I have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to bring it up. I’m still tidying some loose ends, and may have found a kernel bug in the process (Dead loop on virtual device tun6to4, fix it urgently was logged by the kernel repeatedly for awhile).
The second server didn’t fair as well, but that was probably because I was logged in remotely. Maybe due to the v6 annoyances, I lost my SSH connection to the server, so I couldn’t continue the upgrade as it was. I was forced to use apt-get -f install, etc to get it back into a running state. There was also some funkyness with /tmp that I couldn’t explain, but after the reboot things were sane again.
I’m really not happy about having to reboot to fix things. Its not how its done in Linux. I’ll acknowledge that it could well be due to things like libc and kernel upgrades, but Debian does it much better. I can’t think of a single case where an upgrade has required a reboot before things are sane again. Yes, you have to restart processes, but not reboot. Oh, and yes, you have to reboot to install a new running kernel…. For now..
Hopefully I’ll get around to blogging the rest of my setup soonish.
