On 08/09/16 23:07, Clive Menzies wrote:
Hi
We've suffered a series of seemingly disconnect problems on 4 machines
since upgrading jessie on Monday:
<snip>
This nightmare of expanding problems has been going on for three days,
since Monday afternoon. Never before have I questioned the decision to
base our business (and our lives) on Debian and I remain a firm
advocate. I also recognise that over successive releases,
accommodating a plethora of configurations becomes harder and that at
some point a step changes in the foundations of the system are
required. I'm presuming that the transition to systemd from sysv-init
was an essential step and understand that backwards compatibility
becomes more challenging as time goes on.
Whether this systemd transition is related to the remote connectivity
with the servers and the samba issue, I don't know but this number of
seemingly random but mission critical series of problems has shaken
our confidence.
Apologies if this sounds like a complaint, it's not. It is a concern,
which someone may be able to allay, that Debian is not as rock solid
as it was.
We've reinstalled all 4 servers and after customising the latest .conf
files for dovecot, samba and rsyncd, everything is now communicating as
required. Phew!
In retrospect, our practice of keeping our customised .conf files
through successive upgrades was probably a mistake. Backwards
compatibility worked fine for years, and then suddenly it didn't on a
routine upgrade (not a stable transition or point release). In future,
we'll accept the maintainer's .conf and customise as necessary. It may
add to the time for significant upgrades but should save us a similar
episode in future.
This hasn't destroyed our confidence in Debian and I recognise that my
lack of knowledge and previous neglect are probably the root causes of
our recent problems. It does, however, beg the question: should there be
something in the installation warnings to emphasise the risks of keeping
old conf files?
If this episode has done anything, it's greatly improved our
understanding of what's going on "under the bonnet". Hitherto, we've
worked on the basis of: if it ain't broke, don't mess with it.
Finally, the systemd tools make monitoring and understanding where
problems arise much easier. In this context, we've one minor wrinkle
outstanding. After reboot:/
$ sudo systemctl --all status/
gives: /Warning: Unit file changed on disk, 'systemctl daemon-reload'
recommended.
/Running/:
//$ sudo //systemctl daemon-reload /
fixes it but it would be good to prevent it in the first place.
Thanks
Clive/
/
--
Clive Menzies
http://freecriticalthinking.org
