Hey. On Mon, 23 Jun 2003 10:39:14 +1000 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Is it possible to non-destructively upgrade a Debian "potato" install > to a Debian "woody" install non-destructively? (Ie. Not loose data?)
In my experience, the upgrade is fairly painless. Make sure you've got a backup of /etc, and possibly /var if you're paranoid. But debian packages won't touch /home, so there's very little to worry about there. My list of things to look out for when upgrading debian potato servers consists mostly of packages that have undergone fairly major changes to configuration file location/format. They usually have scripts to automate the updating, which almost always work as expected. Almost. :-) - The squid configuration sometimes breaks, especially if your upgrade was interrupted and restarted. Most important thing I found that needed checking was the format of the cache_dir parameter. - sendmail will want to regenerate its config, which you might not want to do. In that case, sendmail isn't actually started again after the upgrade, which left me scratching my head for a surprisingly long time the first time I did it. :-) - If you're migrating from ipac to ipac-ng (probably because of a kernel upgrade), make sure you've got a backup of ipac.conf. ipac-ng will merrily overwrite it. The syntax is completely compatible though, so just copy the old file to /etc/ipac/ - I think I saw one or two minor issues with samba, but the error checking is verbose enough to make fixing it trivial. Probably not an exhaustive list, but they're the only major dramas I've had. Comparing the before and after output of ps and nmap is good. But the most important thing, I've found, is making sure you have a fresh cup of coffee before you start, and don't panic. :-) -- Pete -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://lists.slug.org.au/listinfo/slug
