Fwd: The forthcoming Debian 10.0 (buster) release - BitFolk Users

7 Jul 2019

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Keith Williams &lt;keithwilliamsnp(a)gmail.com&gt;
Date: Sun, 7 Jul 2019 at 14:57
Subject: Re: [bitfolk] The forthcoming Debian 10.0 (buster) release
To: Hugo Mills &lt;hugo-bf(a)carfax.org.uk&gt;

I was reading in the pages and pages of guidance notes that there can be a
problem with entropy starvation, even to the extent of SSH not working
properly. Debian recommend doing a lot of pings as soon as you can to build
up the entropy. Of course, how you do that during an install is another
matter...
Keith

On Sun, 7 Jul 2019 at 14:06, Hugo Mills &lt;hugo-bf(a)carfax.org.uk&gt; wrote:

...
  On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 01:55:46PM +0100, Keith
Williams wrote:
  Well I have done the upgrade on one VPS.
Preparation including backing up
 all db and /etc/ plus one or two other "just in case" files and
 uninstalling packages that were never installed from official archives 3  or
  4 hours, upgrade itself few minutes, sorting out
problems all the rest of
 the morning.
 Problems encountered:-
 Bind. Over several upgrades I have always kept the old config files. It
 seems that some ancient deprecated options now throw an error not a
 warning. systemctl start followed by journalctl -xe details all the
 problems, even the line numbers in the files so it was a matter of  minutes
  to fix
 Wireguard still seems to need the unstable repository, so changing that
 back it all worked, the conf file was still there so OK, same could not  be
  said of NFTables, had to reload conf file from
back up.
 Then the 3 bigger ones:-
 Roundcube. During install it said it had to reconfigure the database. I
 will have to purge, drop that database and reinstall from scratch
 unfortunately
 Dovecot. My initial setting up, a few years back took ages (I was  learning
  as I went) so I said no to replacing conf files.
Had same problem as with
 Bind, setting which before led to a warning, now stop it from starting.
 Same trick as before and only one setting to change. The error message  even
  tells you what to change it to. I should have
heeded the warnings before.
 But it does mean that although Dovecot is delivering the mail to the  boxes,
  I am unable to log onto Postfix as it uses
Dovecot to verify credentials.
 But then my webmail uses Roundcube so I can't get at that mail at the
 moment anyway
 Webmin. I use this as a graphical interface when working with big  databases
  or updating and cleaning up all my zonefiles.
It's just easier. Handy for
 editing Apache virtual host files. I was able to install it and start it
 then the connection drops to the miniserv server. I think it is related  to
  an upgrading of the perl libraries in the
upgrade. Did not have the same
 with my home boxes a couple of weeks ago. That is non urgent though.
 Hopefully some lessons learnt so mistakes won't be repeated during  upgrade
  of my other VPS tomorrow. Most of these
irritations would probably not  have
  arisen if I had cleaned up the conf files
beforehand.
 Hope there is something useful there for anyone else upgrading 
    I'm doing a reinstall from scratch on a new VPS. So far, I haven't
 hit anything awkward (other than not knowing how to set up nginx -- I
 decided to switch from Apache).

    My only real issue so far is that writing random data to the 250
 GiB encrypted archive-storage volume took about 6 hours. I'm not sure
 if that's entropy starvation on the randomness, very slow storage, or
 slow CPU doing the encryption. I was doing it in the installer, so I
 didn't have much leeway to investigate deeper.

    Hugo.

  Keith

 On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 at 00:16, Andy Smith &lt;andy(a)bitfolk.com&gt; wrote:

 > Hello,
 >
 > Debian 10 (buster) is supposed to be released later today. Those who
 > wish to upgrade to it in the usual Debian way should be able to do
 > so after reading the release notes for any gotchas:
 >
 >     https://www.debian.org/releases/testing/amd64/release-notes/
 >
 > I am not aware of any gotchas that are specific to the BitFolk
 > environment, but if you think you have found one please do let us
 > know.
 >
 > If planning a clean install, the "buster" release has been available
 > for some time in our Xen Shell, but under the code name
 > "debian_testing", because right now it still is technically the
 > testing release.
 >
 > If you issue the command:
 >
 >     xen shell> install debian_testing
 >
 > now or at any time after the release of Debian 10 then I believe
 > this should result in a working install of Debian 10. I just tested
 > it with a minimal install (base system + openssh) and it seems to
 > (still) work.
 >
 > It may be several days after the release before we can get around to
 > updating the labels in the Xen Shell so that "debian_buster" is there
 > and "debian_testing" gets you "bullseye". It does tell you what
it's
 > going to install so there should be no confusion.
 >
 > Cheers,
 > Andy
 > 
 --
 Hugo Mills             | One of these days, I'll catch that man without a
 hugo@... carfax.org.uk | quotation, and he'll look undressed.
 http://carfax.org.uk/  |
 PGP: E2AB1DE4          |                                   Leto Atreides,
 Dune