{"id":949,"date":"2011-10-04T21:17:25","date_gmt":"2011-10-05T02:17:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/?p=949"},"modified":"2013-09-25T14:56:01","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T19:56:01","slug":"upgrading-debian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/2011\/10\/04\/upgrading-debian\/","title":{"rendered":"Upgrading Debian"},"content":{"rendered":"

After spending the last two weeks upgrading various versions of Debian to Squeeze, I figured I would post the details of how to upgrade each version, starting from Debian 3.1 to Debian 6.0.<\/p>\n

The safest way to upgrade to Debian Squeeze is to upgrade from the prior version until you reach version 6.x. \u00c2\u00a0In order words, if you are upgrading from Debian 4.x, need to upgrade to Debian 5.x and THEN to Debian 6.x. \u00c2\u00a0Direct upgrades are not at all\u00c2\u00a0recommended.<\/p>\n

Here are the steps that I took when I upgrading between various versions.<\/p>\n

Sarge to Etch:<\/p>\n

I was able to upgrade all of our Debian 3.1 machines to Debian 4.0 using the following commands. \u00c2\u00a0I did not encounter any real surprises when I upgraded any of our physical of virtual machines.<\/p>\n

You can upgrade using apt and the following commands:<\/p>\n

# apt-get update
\n# apt-get dist-upgrade<\/div>\n

Etch to Lenny:<\/p>\n

The only real issue to note when upgrading from Debian 4.0 to 5.0, is that Lenny does not provide the drivers by default for any of the Broadcom network adapter drivers used by a majority of our Dell servers. \u00c2\u00a0This caused some stress for me since I was doing the upgrades without physical access to the servers, so after I completed the upgrade to 5.0 and rebooted the server, of course I was not able to access the server because the NIC cards were no longer\u00c2\u00a0recognised by Debian.<\/p>\n

In order to resolve this issue you will need to install the ‘firmware-bnx2<\/a>‘ package after you do the upgrade but BEFORE you reboot the server.<\/p>\n

The reason that the Debian team does not include these drivers by default is due to license restrictions placed on the firmware. \u00c2\u00a0If you want to read more about this issue you can view the very short bug report\u00c2\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The best tool for upgrading to Debian 5 is aptitude:<\/p>\n

# aptitude update
\n# aptitude install apt dpkg aptitude
\n# aptitude full-upgrade<\/div>\n

Lenny to Squeeze:<\/p>\n

Upgrading Debian 5.o to 6.0 was also\u00c2\u00a0relatively painless as well. \u00c2\u00a0One issue that I did run into revolved around the new version of udev and kernel versions prior to 2.6.26. \u00c2\u00a0We had a few servers that were using kernel versions in the 2.6.18 range and if don’t upgrade the kernel version before you reboot, you may have issues with certain devices not being\u00c2\u00a0recognized or named correctly and thus you may have issues that prevent a\u00c2\u00a0successful bootup.<\/p>\n

You can use the following apt commands to complete the upgrade process:<\/p>\n

# apt-get update
\n# apt-get dist-upgrade -u<\/div>\n

Here are the repo’s that used while doing the upgrades:<\/p>\n

#Debian Etch-4<\/strong>deb http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian\/ etch main non-free contrib
\ndeb-src http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian\/ etch main non-free contrib<\/p>\n

deb http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian-security\/ etch\/updates main non-free contrib
\ndeb-src http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian-security\/ etch\/updates main non-free contrib<\/p>\n

# Debian Lenny-5<\/strong>
\ndeb http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian\/ lenny main contrib non-free
\ndeb-src http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian\/ lenny main contrib non-free<\/p>\n

deb http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian-security lenny\/updates main contrib non-free
\ndeb-src http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian-security lenny\/updates main contrib non-free<\/p>\n

deb http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian-volatile lenny\/volatile main contrib non-free
\ndeb-src http:\/\/archive.debian.org\/debian-volatile lenny\/volatile main contrib non-free<\/p>\n

# Debian Squeeze-6<\/strong>
\ndeb http:\/\/ftp.us.debian.org\/debian squeeze main contrib non-free<\/p>\n

deb http:\/\/ftp.debian.org\/debian\/ squeeze-updates main contrib non-free
\ndeb http:\/\/security.debian.org\/ squeeze\/updates main contrib non-free<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After spending the last two weeks upgrading various versions of Debian to Squeeze, I figured I would post the details of how to upgrade each version, starting from Debian 3.1 to Debian 6.0. The safest way to upgrade to Debian Squeeze is to upgrade from the prior version until you reach version 6.x. \u00c2\u00a0In order […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=949"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":965,"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/949\/revisions\/965"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shainmiley.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}