5 Jul
2019
5 Jul
'19
11:15 p.m.
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
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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5 Jul
5 Jul
11:20 p.m.
On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 11:15:26PM +0000, Andy Smith wrote:
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.
I forgot to add: if you're planning to do a new install and you're
currently on 32-bit, I strongly recommend that you pick 64-bit
unless you have a very good reason for requiring 32-bit. You can
switch between 32- and 64-bit with the "arch" command.
That goes for anyone installing anything new at BitFolk, not just
Debian 10.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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6 Jul
6 Jul
11:38 a.m.
Having already upgraded 2 home boxes to Buster over recent weeks, I will
today start to do so with my VPS. However I already have a query that you
might be able to help with Andy, and which might be useful to other
customers. It concerns interface names. I followed the advice on Debian and
Udev sites and the name Udev is suggesting for my eth0 is some preposterous
one along the lines of epx followed by the complete MAC address (OK a
slight exaggeration). That is the only one returned by
*udevadm test-builtin net_id /sys/class/net/eth0 2>/dev/null*
Outputs
*ID_NET_NAME_MAC=enx00165e00036c*
*ID_OUI_FROM_DATABASE=Precision I/O*
This is of course too unwieldy to actually use so I followed through the
instructions for changing it to say eth0 to save editing all the /etc files
which explicitly name the interface.
None of the files seem to exist. Is this because it is all under the
control of Xen rather than the virtual machine? i.e. can I stop worrying?
Sorry, I seem to be asking a lot of questions lately
Keith
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 at 00:20, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 11:15:26PM +0000, Andy Smith
wrote:
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.
I forgot to add: if you're planning to do a new install and you're
currently on 32-bit, I strongly recommend that you pick 64-bit
unless you have a very good reason for requiring 32-bit. You can
switch between 32- and 64-bit with the "arch" command.
That goes for anyone installing anything new at BitFolk, not just
Debian 10.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
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12:09 p.m.
OK, a lot of digging and I have found an answer(?)
*ifconfig -a*
I know it's an outdated command, but this gives all the info on the
interface so you can copy the MAC address
Then make a new file
*nano /etc/systemd/network/10-eth0.link*It should contain:
*[Match]MACAddress=<The MAC address of the interface>[Link]Name-eth0*
Now rebooting during install should sort it, or maybe have to redo the
procedure afterwards
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 at 12:38, Keith Williams <keithwilliamsnp(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
Having already upgraded 2 home boxes to Buster over
recent weeks, I will
today start to do so with my VPS. However I already have a query that you
might be able to help with Andy, and which might be useful to other
customers. It concerns interface names. I followed the advice on Debian and
Udev sites and the name Udev is suggesting for my eth0 is some preposterous
one along the lines of epx followed by the complete MAC address (OK a
slight exaggeration). That is the only one returned by
*udevadm test-builtin net_id /sys/class/net/eth0 2>/dev/null*
Outputs
*ID_NET_NAME_MAC=enx00165e00036c*
*ID_OUI_FROM_DATABASE=Precision I/O*
This is of course too unwieldy to actually use so I followed through the
instructions for changing it to say eth0 to save editing all the /etc files
which explicitly name the interface.
None of the files seem to exist. Is this because it is all under the
control of Xen rather than the virtual machine? i.e. can I stop worrying?
Sorry, I seem to be asking a lot of questions lately
Keith
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 at 00:20, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
On Fri, Jul 05, 2019 at 11:15:26PM +0000, Andy
Smith wrote:
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.
I forgot to add: if you're planning to do a new install and you're
currently on 32-bit, I strongly recommend that you pick 64-bit
unless you have a very good reason for requiring 32-bit. You can
switch between 32- and 64-bit with the "arch" command.
That goes for anyone installing anything new at BitFolk, not just
Debian 10.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
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6:10 p.m.
Hi Keith,
On Sat, Jul 06, 2019 at 12:38:22PM +0100, Keith Williams wrote:
This is of course too unwieldy to actually use so I
followed through the
instructions for changing it to say eth0 to save editing all the /etc files
which explicitly name the interface.
None of the files seem to exist. Is this because it is all under the
control of Xen rather than the virtual machine? i.e. can I stop worrying?
On the new install that I did, the network interfaces were not
renamed, i.e. they went eth0, eth1, etc. I suspect that udev either
knows not to rename Xen ones, or else it doesn't know anything about
Xen ones so doesn't. Either way I don't think you need to do
anything and the interfaces will stay as eth0.
I think that's probably the best way to keep it as the index of your
network interface is decided on bitfolk's side.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
7:24 p.m.
Andy
Great, thanks, I assumed it was something like that. On my systems at home
there was a change on the one I did a complete fresh install with, but the
new name was simple enough.
Tomorrow will be the big upgrade day for my 2 VPS
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 at 19:10, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
Hi Keith,
On Sat, Jul 06, 2019 at 12:38:22PM +0100, Keith Williams wrote:
This is of course too unwieldy to actually use so
I followed through the
instructions for changing it to say eth0 to save editing all the /etc
files
which explicitly name the interface.
None of the files seem to exist. Is this because it is all under the
control of Xen rather than the virtual machine? i.e. can I stop worrying?
On the new install that I did, the network interfaces were not
renamed, i.e. they went eth0, eth1, etc. I suspect that udev either
knows not to rename Xen ones, or else it doesn't know anything about
Xen ones so doesn't. Either way I don't think you need to do
anything and the interfaces will stay as eth0.
I think that's probably the best way to keep it as the index of your
network interface is decided on bitfolk's side.
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
8:14 p.m.
On 2019-07-05 23:15+0000, Andy Smith 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/
Slightly off-topic, but on the subject of Buster. I wanted to get to
Cambridge to the release party tomorrow but cannot make it now.
Those who are interested can get the details here:
<https://wiki.debian.org/ReleasePartyBuster#ReleasePartyBuster.2FUK.2FCambridge.UK:_Cambridge>
--
Best regards,
Ed http://www.s5h.net/
7 Jul
7 Jul
12:55 p.m.
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
Keith
On Sat, 6 Jul 2019 at 00:16, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> 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
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
_______________________________________________
announce mailing list
announce(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/announce
_______________________________________________
users mailing list
users(a)lists.bitfolk.com
https://lists.bitfolk.com/mailman/listinfo/users
1:06 p.m.
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 <andy(a)bitfolk.com> 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
11:09 p.m.
Hello,
On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 01:55:46PM +0100, Keith Williams wrote:
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.
I have to say I've always just seen Webmin as something that you
have to learn how to use and manage and hand-hold through every
upgrade when you could just be learning how to do it the standard
way, or with config management, either of which would be a better
investment of time.
In my humble opinion! 😀
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
8 Jul
8 Jul
7:48 p.m.
*"I have to say I've always just seen Webmin as something that youhave to
learn how to use and manage and hand-hold through everyupgrade when you
could just be learning how to do it the standardway, or with config
management, either of which would be a betterinvestment of time."*
True to a large extent. But as with any tool its usefulness depends upon
the situation within which it is used.
Back in "The olden days" when I used iptables for the firewall for example.
Using the commandline to check and adjust the rules and how they worked
would involve a lot of time and fiddling with for example iptables -Lv then
delete a rule and then reinsert it with a series of types commands and so
on. With webmin a click to the iptables page, a rapid and accurate skim
through the table and click on the up and down links to rearrange order.
Nowadays, of course, it is even easier checking and amending the firewall,
just typing nano /etc/nftables.conf brings up the whole set of tables ipv4
and ipv6 laid out schematically and easily editted.
That's just one example. For many tasks it is a bit of a pain getting it to
do the things in the way that I want and anything to do with net interfaces
or routes it is damn near impossible and the command line tools quick and
easy to use. And again to use it effectively you do need to have an
understanding of what is happening and how to do the things manually. You
need to have an understanding of what is happening under the bonnet,
obviously
You use it in situations and for tasks where it is more efficient to do it
that way.
Having the repository in sourcelists.d Means that updating involves typing
apt update followed by apt upgrade.
;-) Keith
On Mon, 8 Jul 2019 at 00:10, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote:
Hello,
On Sun, Jul 07, 2019 at 01:55:46PM +0100, Keith Williams wrote:
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.
I have to say I've always just seen Webmin as something that you
have to learn how to use and manage and hand-hold through every
upgrade when you could just be learning how to do it the standard
way, or with config management, either of which would be a better
investment of time.
In my humble opinion! 😀
Cheers,
Andy
--
https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
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10 comments
4 participants
participants (4)
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Ed -
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Keith Williams