2009-03-14

Well, that was painless... mostly...

I noticed that Debian had released version 5.0 Lenny. Considering I was still running my server on Debian 3.1 and had completely missed 4.0, I decided that it was probably time to upgrade.

I went to Debian's site, followed the handy link to the release notes (that was in the sentence "If you are upgrading from a previous version"), went to the chapter about upgrading (chapter 4, if you were wondering), and followed the step-by-step instructions.

When I rebooted my system, I did so directly from the machine itself, which was good, because installing the new kernel did not select it as the default in grub. I also noticed that iptables did not load its rule set, and I quickly discovered it was because I had recompiled the previous kernel myself to include a "TARPIT" rule that didn't exist in a stock kernel image. Updating the rules to just go to a "drop" rule seemed to work, except my wireless subnet was having difficulty connecting. Long story short, I didn't need the extra drop rules (basic ones already existed), and once I removed them, all was right with the world.

I was even able to upgrade PHP to version 5 and finally get the graphs working in the vnstat PHP front-end. (They're still limited to the rolling 30 days that vnstat records, so I'll still be using my own graphs for my reports, though.)

All in all, it was a pretty painless process, most of it I was able to do from the comfort of my laptop.

[edit] Um, mostly. It seems that about a third of my packets between the internet and my wireless subnet are just getting dropped. Figures; it couldn't be that smooth.

1 comment:

Yakko Warner said...

Well, what do you know.

The upgrade set my MTU on eth0 to 576. I set it to 1500 (what "everyone" seems to say is appropriate for a cable modem), and everything works again.

How did I find this? My Xbox 360 told me so! It couldn't connect to Xbox Live, so I ran the network test, and it came back and said my MTU setting was too low. And sure enough, it was right.

All Hail the Xbox 360! :D