Me, the sysadmin: Sarge upgrade
I’ve upgraded my server to sarge. It was pressing for some time, and needing subversion as I convert the KDE CVSfilter to Commitfilter I simply had to do this. (Note - one of the two links won’t work depending on your DNS. Good luck.)
So I started:
$ uname -a
Linux vs011 2.4.26-1um #4 Tue Apr 20 17:09:55 PDT 2004 i686 unknown
$ uptime
17:59:20 up 305 days, 8:09, 1 user, load average: 0.51, 0.43, 0.38
Not bad, eh? And then: vim /etc/apt/sources.list; apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade
The transition went smooth, although there are some oddities, and I’m going to list them here.
- when updating python 2.1 to 2.3, the pygame package is removed instead of updated
- there are conflicts where there shouldn’t be: proftpd vs. vsftpd, inetd vs. xinetd - it’s perfectly fine to have them installed side by side, no need to let them conflict!
- all the small cron jobs, which are cluttered around and asked for conffile change permission, should go away
- the helper scripts should dismiss all keyboard input before displaying their questions. This is a real programming bug
- somehow related to xinetd, it disabled some services in inetd.conf but not all of them. Huh?
Of course I disabled all services before the upgrade (except for SSH), and I had to reenable them afterwards. The conversion of exim3 to exim4 was painless. Also, Apache continues to work as expected. The biggest fish, mailman, is yet to be done, as are the databases. But since I wanted to work with subversion, here we go:
svn co svn://svn.kde.org:/home/kde/trunk/KDE/kdelibs
And it just hangs and does nothing. No timeout, no message, no network traffic - nothing. Damn. With anonsvn, it tells me: connection refused. Damn, again.

