Anyway

Ive been intend­ing on upgrad­ing my Debi­an firewall/blog box to the latest ver­sion, called ‘sarge’ (a.k.a 3.1) for some months now. Today was the day I decided to finally bite the bul­let. Since I’ve been using back­ports of unstable ver­sions of soft­ware, such as MySQL (see Upgrad­ing MySQL on Debi­an for that pro­cess, and Enabling Thumb­nails for the pro­cess to upgrade libgd) I figured this could be a little trick­i­er than I really like, and I should be pre­pared. Here’s the his­tor­ic­al record of actu­ally get­ting it run­ning. YMMV, of course!

First, the doc­u­ment­a­tion on the Debi­an web site is good. The upgrad­ing instruc­tions are writ­ten per hard­ware plat­form and seem com­plete. I star­ted, as recom­men­ded in Upgrad­ing your Woody sys­tem by repla­cing the word “stable” in the /etc/apt/sources.list file with the word “woody” and then check­ing I had woody’s ver­sion of aptitude installed.

After copy­ing the recom­men­ded files to a safe loc­a­tion (that’s a lot of files!), I deleted the /etc/preferences file after sav­ing a copy — this is the file that says which ver­sions of any soft­ware to use. Since to begin with I want to use a clean, stand­ard Debi­an sarge dis­tri­bu­tion, I don’t need this file. Then it was on to sec­tion 4.2.2, “Check­ing pack­ages status”. I found that apt-get showed no holds, but aptitude showed that php4 was on hold (I can­’t ima­gine why). So I got rid of the hold.

After that, I just fol­lowed the steps, tak­ing the defaults mostly (since I did­n’t under­stand some of the ques­tions, that was an easy choice! One day I might under­stand what pango and defoma are all about, but in the mean­time I’ve decided not to both­er). There were a couple of mes­sages that mostly seemed ignor­able (note to self: upgrade exim3 to exim4 at some stage in the future) and all in all the pro­cess ran smoothly, if not par­tic­u­larly fast on my old, slow Pen­ti­um box. 

Time to check the res­ults — try my web site and find it’s been replaced by a gen­er­ic “wel­come to an Apache web site” mes­sage. The web serv­er has been magic­ally upgraded to Apache 2.0, which I had­n’t quite expec­ted or planned for. Oh well, time to hit the Apache documentation.

There’s a big dif­fer­ence between Debi­an upgrade doc­u­ment­a­tion and Apache upgrade doc­u­ment­a­tion. Where the Debi­an upgrade instruc­tions are exactly that (“Do this, then this. Run this com­mand and if you get this out­put, do this, oth­er­wise do that”), the Apache doc­u­ment­a­tion on Upgrad­ing to 2.0 from 1.3 is basic­ally a list of fea­ture changes, rather than instruc­tions on how to upgrade or what modi­fic­a­tions need to be made to the con­fig­ur­a­tion files. Look­ing at the con­fig­ur­a­tion files them­selves in the Debi­an Sarge Apache 2 dis­tri­bu­tion you can see, for example, that httpd.conf has changed markedly from being the main con­fig­ur­a­tion file to con­tain­ing simply a com­ment say­ing it exists for back­wards com­pat­ib­il­ity only. The README file does have some clues to the new files, with short descrip­tions of what they’re used for. The most inter­est­ing new dir­ect­ory to me was sites-enabled, which seemed to have some­thing to do with set­ting up vir­tu­al hosts. So I typed sites-enabled into the Apache doc­u­ment­a­tion search engine and found no hits what­so­ever. The Vir­tu­al­Host part of the doc­u­ment­a­tion for Apache 2.0 says “Below is a list of doc­u­ment­a­tion pages which explain all details of vir­tu­al host sup­port in Apache ver­sion 1.3 and later.” Hmmm, things do seem to have changed some­what between Apache 1.3 and Apache 2.0. On the oth­er hand, it’s always pos­sible that this par­tic­u­lar con­fig­ur­a­tion and choice of dir­ect­ory names etc is due to Debi­an rather than Apache; the Debi­an dis­tri­bu­tions do have a repu­ta­tion for put­ting files in places that are unex­pec­ted and maybe this has exten­ded to the names used in the Debi­an fla­vour of the Apache install­a­tions. If this is the case it’s not sur­pris­ing it isn’t doc­u­mented on the Apache web site.

For­tu­nately oth­ers have writ­ten this up; I found Upgrad­ing to Apache 2 which described the pur­pose of the sites-enabled and sites-avail­able dir­ect­or­ies in ways that make sense and worked when I tried them out. The same prin­ciples apply to mak­ing the mod_rewrite mod­ule avail­able, which Word­Press uses for rewrit­ing the URLs for archives and categories.

So far, so good. My web site is avail­able again, just not my blog. The error mes­sage is “Your PHP install­a­tion appears to be miss­ing the MySQL which is required for Word­Press”. When I check, all the neces­sary pack­ages are installed. A quick search through the Word­Press sup­port site turns up that I’ve for­got­ten to uncom­ment the MySQL mod­ule in the php.ini file. I’m so used to Debi­an just doing the right thing that it seems odd to have to make that change, some­how. Now my blog is back as well, everything else seems to be work­ing, no files seem to have been lost, and over­all the upgrade was a lot less pain­ful than I had anticipated.