26 December, 2006

 

Mondo Rescue Debian News

I've used the Christmas time to do some work on Mondo Rescue:

I've uploaded mindi-2.20-2 which fixes RC bug #403454 and important bug #404315. Luckily, I only had to apply patches provided by Matija & Bruno - thanks guys! I've asked for the new version to be allowed into Etch but haven't heard anything yet (maybe I should have waited a few days first or something?).

Also, I've packaged the new pre-release version of Mondo Rescue. You can grab it from here: http://people.debian.org/~andree/packages/. I would much appreciate feedback on how things are working on Etch. So, if you take them for a spin, please let me know how it went, good or bad! The upcoming new release fixes a substantial number of bugs and comes with some notable improvements, so it should definitely be worth checking out.

Finally, when doing some testing I came across a problem with the stock Debian 2.6.18 kernel when used on a Mondo Rescue recovery media. It sometimes already hangs while booting and sometimes starts the restore only to hang later during formatting or even later during restore. This seems to only happen on i386 whereas amd64 is fine. It may also be restricted to my hardware (although it hangs in Qemu as well). 2.6.17 is fine btw. If anyone has an idea what could be causing this, that would be great as I haven't got the foggiest at the moment (there is no message whatsoever, it just hangs).

03 December, 2006

 

Upgrade Testing with QEMU

I have been really busy until two weeks ago [Shameless plug: If you need a (technical) project manager and/or hands-on Basis person to get your SAP R/3 system upgraded to ECC6, get in touch.]. Which means I've been a bit slack - so slack in fact that Andreas Barth had to resolve an RC bug in one of my packages - mea culpa.

Ridden by guilt I decided to finally do what I've been wanting to for some time: Putting the steps together to do a Debian test upgrade using QEMU. I chose QEMU because it is free and readily comes with Debian. It is slower than VMware, at least without the non-free kernel module, but still usable on somewhat reasonable hardware. The actual upgrade steps given below are independent of the virtualisation technology used, so they will apply to VMware as well.

Without further ado, here goes:
All in all, things seem to work ok. However, this is far from hitting the friendly green upgrade button and it just happens. So, I thought I try the next best thing to the friendly green upgrade button which is synaptic. Doing an upgrade with synaptic does actually work quite smoothly. It needs to be restarted a few times, leaves some cruft in terms of obsolete and orphan packages and the reboot doesn't really work from within Gnome, but other than that it is ok. Most notably, it didn't leave me with an unusable system in the middle of it all.

Robert Collins made some interesting remarks about the challenges of upgrades last week when we had dinner with Martin Krafft and a number of other great people. It looks like the Ubuntu folks are working on improving update-manager but also the underlying infrastructure to smooth out the upgrade process. Maybe there could be an opportunity to work together on this and achieve a situation where upgrades become as smooth as installs are now due to the fantastic work of the d-i people.

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