Upgrade to Dapper
I recently upgraded Ubuntu Breezy to Ubuntu Dapper via a apt-get dist-upgrade. The dry-run looked like it was going to probably work, so I just fired it up. It ended up being a lot faster than downloading the ISOs and installing from them. But there were problems.
Many of the problems I had could have been prevented by being more conservative about the new configurations I was presented with. When there were conflicting changes to config files I could review the diffs and decide if I wanted to keep my current custom version or the new developers version. I only picked the current custom version a few times, when I could see changes that I remembered making.
- The local machines couldn't see through the firewall anymore.
- After I puzzled about this trying to determine which machines could see which and whether DNS was failing or DHCP, I got an inspiration. I checked
cat /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
and found that it was set to 0. I echoed a 1 in there and fixed that with no more hassle.
- Mediawiki started acting odd.
- It seemed to be torn between the packaged version of 1.4.14 and the version it had been running before the "upgrade" which was 1.5.3. I didn't find an immediate fix, so I upgraded to 1.6.6. That still didn't work. It was slow and gave an SQL error after making a change to a page. I dug enough to find that the problem was a crashed table (mw_searchindex), and no amount of mysqlcheck or myisamchk repairing could make it better. Well, they said they fixed it, but an immediate check of the table after fixing, showed it was crashed again. There was a simple fix in the mediawiki/maintenance directory: I just had to run rebuildtextindex.php. That dropped the old table, and rebuild a good version. It is still dog slow, but appears to be free of corruption.
- Mail stopped flowing.
- This was a saslauthd problem. I didn't notice when the upgrade slipped in a change to the location of saslauthd. I like it to be in /var/run instead of in the postfix chroot jail. I had to put my edits back in:
/etc/default/saslauthd /etc/init.d/saslauthd
and then restart the various pieces.
- Mail still wasn't flowing.
- Did I forget to start the virus checker? No, but I didn't look too carefully when it said it refused to start because an old config file was in the way. In this case, I had wisely decided that I had important customizations that I didn't want to lose, and the amavis daemon said, OK, but you can keep your precious custom file, but I refuse to start until you delete it. It wasn't enough to rename it with .old on the end. It could still see it. So I put .old on the front too. Ha! Stupid amavis, can't see it now, haha.
