Re: Anyone ever tried a downgrade?
On Lu, 07 mar 11, 08:42:27, Toni S wrote: - Using undo mechanism of aptitude (how does this work?) AFAICT aptitude's undo is only for package selections. Regards, Andrei -- Offtopic discussions among Debian users and developers: http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/d-community-offtopic signature.asc Description: Digital signature
Anyone ever tried a downgrade?
Hi folks, I have lenny running on a headless virtual server being hosted by a small hosting provider and now I'd like to upgrade to squeeze. The box does not serve any commercial purpose, but it does handle a portion of my private email traffic. So I'd like the system not being down for more than 12 hours. In case of any service failures after doing 'sudo aptitude safe- upgrade' I'd like to know some methods to smoothly revert to my current installation. Best would probably be to ask my hosting provider to make a disk snapshot / disk image, but I'd like to know if there are other possibilities. What's your experience? Did you try out something of these: - Using undo mechanism of aptitude (how does this work?) - using 'dpkg-get-selections currentstate.txt' and 'dpkg-set- selections currentstate.txt - making a tar backup and restore it afterwards while the system is running, then reboot? - making small incremental upgrades of individual packages with aptitude instead of upgrading all packages at once / test the new service / revert to old version if necessary (The latter is the way how i've done it with the previous 2 debian releases) What's your recommendation / experience for downgrade? Thanks for any thoughts T. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/60845c41-9e71-4249-8cfa-4192e5be7...@i3g2000vby.googlegroups.com
Re: Anyone ever tried a downgrade?
On Mon, 07 Mar 2011 08:42:27 -0800, Toni S wrote: I have lenny running on a headless virtual server being hosted by a small hosting provider and now I'd like to upgrade to squeeze. The box does not serve any commercial purpose, but it does handle a portion of my private email traffic. So I'd like the system not being down for more than 12 hours. In case of any service failures after doing 'sudo aptitude safe- upgrade' I'd like to know some methods to smoothly revert to my current installation. (...) What's your recommendation / experience for downgrade? If disk space is not a concern, I'd go for a parallel installation. In the event something goes wrong with the new install (or upgrade, if you made a full image of the currently installed system), you only have to boot with the old lenny install, which remains intact and ready to serve you. Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/pan.2011.03.07.17.23...@gmail.com
Re: Anyone ever tried a downgrade?
On 2011-03-07 10:42:27 Toni S wrote: Hi folks, I have lenny running on a headless virtual server being hosted by a small hosting provider and now I'd like to upgrade to squeeze. In case of any service failures after doing 'sudo aptitude safe- upgrade' I'd like to know some methods to smoothly revert to my current installation. Best would probably be to ask my hosting provider to make a disk snapshot / disk image, but I'd like to know if there are other possibilities. What's your experience? Did you try out something of these: Taking a full backup is recommended by the release notes, and that is the way I did it on the VPSes I administrate. - Using undo mechanism of aptitude (how does this work?) Aptitude has undo? - using 'dpkg-get-selections currentstate.txt' and 'dpkg-set- selections currentstate.txt That doesn't actually perform a downgrade. You'll have to follow it with an (apt-get install). Also, it doesn't restore your debonf database nor your APT extended status database (which packages are marked as auto-installed). - making a tar backup and restore it afterwards while the system is running, then reboot? At the very least, shut down everything that's not required for the restore. But, that could work well. It won't clean up newly created files though. - making small incremental upgrades of individual packages with aptitude instead of upgrading all packages at once / test the new service / revert to old version if necessary This is a good way to go. After testing freezes I tend to do this on my desktop and laptop as time permits. What's your recommendation / experience for downgrade? Don't do them. Take backups and restore from them if possible. Either that or soldier through the issues with the new version(s) and get them working enough. The upgrade didn't take me 12 hours on any system, at least not all at once. There were a couple of short clean-up sessions over the next 2 days, but nothing critical. -- Boyd Stephen Smith Jr. ,= ,-_-. =. b...@iguanasuicide.net ((_/)o o(\_)) ICQ: 514984 YM/AIM: DaTwinkDaddy `-'(. .)`-' http://iguanasuicide.net/\_/ signature.asc Description: This is a digitally signed message part.
Re: Anyone ever tried a downgrade?
Op Mon, 7 Mar 2011 17:23:36 + (UTC) Camaleón noela...@gmail.com schreef: If disk space is not a concern, I'd go for a parallel installation. In the event something goes wrong with the new install (or upgrade, if you made a full image of the currently installed system), you only have to boot with the old lenny install, which remains intact and ready to serve you. Greetings, While I agree that's a more secure/stable solution, I would never do that for a desktop. I just use all repos and move back if really needed. APT/aptitude does everything else. Jens. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20110307202243.1837c...@squeeze.telenet.be
Re: Anyone ever tried a downgrade?
On Mon, 07 Mar 2011 20:22:43 +0100, Jens Van Broeckhoven wrote: Op Mon, 7 Mar 2011 17:23:36 + (UTC) Camaleón schreef: If disk space is not a concern, I'd go for a parallel installation. In the event something goes wrong with the new install (or upgrade, if you made a full image of the currently installed system), you only have to boot with the old lenny install, which remains intact and ready to serve you. While I agree that's a more secure/stable solution, I would never do that for a desktop. I just use all repos and move back if really needed. APT/aptitude does everything else. I've been using the parallelized installation procedure for both servers and desktops (and my own workstation) and have been working pretty good. The time I have to spend in installing from scratch is the time I gain avoiding all the upgrading issues|workarounds|RTFM ;-) Greetings, -- Camaleón -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of unsubscribe. Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/pan.2011.03.07.21.18...@gmail.com
