Improvement of headless server upgrades

[Helmut K. C. Tessarek]

This is my first mail in a Debian mailing list and I hope I've chosen the correct one. There are way too many lists thus please direct me to the correct one, in case I messed up.

    _  _____ _____ _____ _   _ _____ ___ ___  _   _
   / \|_   _|_   _| ____| \ | |_   _|_ _/ _ \| \ | |
  / _ \ | |   | | |  _| |  \| | | |  | | | | |  \| |
 / ___ \| |   | | | |___| |\  | | |  | | |_| | |\  |
/_/   \_\_|   |_| |_____|_| \_| |_| |___\___/|_| \_|

Network interface name changed: please update config files before reboot.

    _  _____ _____ _____ _   _ _____ ___ ___  _   _
   / \|_   _|_   _| ____| \ | |_   _|_ _/ _ \| \ | |
  / _ \ | |   | | |  _| |  \| | | |  | | | | |  \| |
 / ___ \| |   | | | |___| |\  | | |  | | |_| | |\  |
/_/   \_\_|   |_| |_____|_| \_| |_| |___\___/|_| \_|

Network subsystem changed: please add a system connection before reboot.



Cheers,
  K. C.

P.S.: I go by KC, trying to avoid the Spaceballs Dark Helmet mixup.


--
regards Helmut K. C. Tessarek              KeyID 0x172380A011EF4944
Key fingerprint = 8A55 70C1 BD85 D34E ADBC 386C 1723 80A0 11EF 4944

/*
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   await thee at its end.
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I would like to make a suggestion for release upgrades. It should not be a huge effort to implement and I can work with someone to make this happen. In the last few days I ran into a serious issue when upgrading to newer releases on 3 headless servers: the network connection went dead. In the first situation the interface name changed from eth0 to end0 and after the reboot my adapter got a link-local address. In the second situation dhcpcd was replaced by Network Manager and once again the network was dead. Please don't get me wrong, I am not against keeping up with the times and use new technology. Far from it. But in both cases I had to connect my headless machines to a monitor and keyboard and fix the network issues. Usually this is not a problem, but sometimes it might be impossible. In both cases I did not even know that these things would happen. The dist-upgrade made the changes without my input and I was left in the dark. Iamgine my surprise when I couldn't connect to my boxes anymore. Both network "outages" could have been prevented by adding a note at the end of the dist-upgrade output. e.g. something like the following (monospace font required for the "Attention" text): Is this something that makes sense? Often you have a remote console like an iLO or whatever cloud systems provide. But in some cases there is nothing. No console, no monitor, no keyboard. Only a power and a network cable.

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