I upgraded from Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) to Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) today. In general the upgrade was relatively painless, but as always some things went worse than they could… đ
My local Subversion repository is using a Berkeley DB, and the underlying BDB version went up from 4.8 to 5.1. In consequence I got an error when I wanted to check in a changed config file:
svn: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch svn: bdb: Program version 5.1 doesn't match environment version 4.8
I remember that this has already been an issue with the last major Debian upgrade… Did I miss something in the release notes or package doc, or did the Debian folks miss this one?!
Anyway, here’s how to repair the above (based on instructions found here). Install packages db4.8-util and db5.1-util and execute the following commands:
# cd /path/to/repo # db4.8_checkpoint -1 # db4.8_recover # db4.8_archive log.0000000024 # svnlook youngest .. 746 # db5.1_archive -d
Afterwards you can remove the two packages again.
Next thing I noticed was that my logging somehow was not working any longer as it used to do… I log most of the messages into a common file called paranoid.log, and use logcheck to scan this for noteworthy events… After the upgrade to Wheezy logging to paranoid.log stopped…
Investigation turned out that in Wheezy rsyslog is used as the standard logging daemon, and consequently the config file changed from /etc/syslog.conf to /etc/rsyslog.conf. During the upgrade I was not notified about the change (and again, it was not in the release notes!), nor were my customizations migrated automatically. No big deal, but it would have been “nice” if people had told me…
Another thing was that collectd was giving me loads of error messages in syslog. It turned out that I was suffering from this problem. It was as easily fixed as described in the referenced article…
Now to something very pleasant…
I have my root filesystem on a RAID1 device, and before the upgrade I was still using LILO. After I upgraded my server to the standard kernel in Wheezy, my box did not came up again after a reboot (well, that was not pleasant!).
So I called my hoster, Hetzner, today on a Saturday(!), and they were as responsive as they are always when I needed them (thankfully enough only once in a year or two, mainly during Debian upgrades ;-)). They even temporarily gave me a remote console, Lara, for free, so that I had direct console access via my web browser to fix things on the lowest level. I migrated to GRUB, and that fixed my booting problems. Thanks, guys, you’re the greatest — this is exactly why I’m your loyal customer since almost 10 years now…
Considering all issues I have found so far this seems to be one of the most painless major Debian updates I have had so far — and I started using Debian with 2.0 IIRC, so I’ve seen quite some so far…
