On Mon, 2 Jul 2018 09:55:48 +0000 (UTC) Curt <cu...@free.fr> wrote: > On 2018-07-02, Joe <j...@jretrading.com> wrote: > > On Sun, 1 Jul 2018 17:43:02 -0500 > > David Wright <deb...@lionunicorn.co.uk> wrote: > > > > > >> > >> Why? If you find the cause, you can fix it. Upgrades are careful > >> about preserving the system's integrity to run. > >> > > > > Less and less with each version. > > > > I have a wheezy: I cloned it to a spare desktop machine, upgraded > > with some significant difficulty to jessie, tried the next step to > > stretch and abandoned it. I believe there will be less work in a > > new install, which I'm now probably about a week into, with another > > week to go. > > > > Back in the days of etch, it was an hour or two. Not any more. > > > > I upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie to Stretch without a problem (except > I ran out of space, which conveniently circles back on a certain > raison d'être of this thread, and apt-get cleaned right in the middle > of it all to free up room, which got me through while at the same > time nearly condemning me to a special circle of dependency hell). > > Of course I'm talking here about upgrading *in situ*, a proven path, > not cloning to another machine, whose specificities are unknown to us > in relation to the cloned machine, and then upgrading from there, for > reasons only known to yourself. In fact, Joe, I'm declaring an illegal > goalpost move on you and fining you a blame (remember: three blames > and you're out--or is that strikes?).
No, I'm not talking about hardware incompatibilities, I mean software rot. For the most part, a drive moved to another machine will either run normally or not at all. The copy ran fine on the other machine. It's a server, so I'm not bothered about super-whizzy peripherals, wifi etc. As long as there's enough RAM, and enough bits in the processor, there's not usually much trouble. But it's loaded (encrusted?) with a lot of server software, some of it dating from sarge. Sometimes a version upgrade involves a significant software upgrade, sometimes it doesn't. FreeRADIUS has hardly changed at all for many years (though it's one that won't even start in stretch). But as I mentioned to Michelle, PHP5 is no more, so there was a fair bit of tweaking to old php stuff. Samba has dropped deprecated configurations, and I have two versions of windows clients, so that was another afternoon of messing about. Systemd. Need I say more? It hasn't been all that difficult, but as I said, old software, so a certain amount of mucking about with service files. My iptables scripts were written on Linux From Scratch, then installed on sarge. No go. When there's that much work to do, upgrading seems pointless, one might as well do a clean installation and leave at least some of the cruft behind. That was my point: even with a lot of server software, upgrading used to be a matter of half an hour for checking and cleanup, half an hour of downloading, than maybe an hour of installation. Use the new config files where needed, then another half-hour for tweaking them to work like the old ones. Half a day at the most, with the machine pretty well running normally during most of that time. It's not like that now. -- Joe
