Server upgrade experience

[Matt Zimmerman]

Today I upgraded my (Woody) server to Warty.  This was a non-trivial
environment, with non-root filesystems on LVM volumes, running services,
etc.  This is the box which serves up the MythTV debs and miscellaneous
other things.

I decided to be ambitious and upgrade it at the same time from Linux 2.4.x
to 2.6.x, move from devfs to udev, switch from lilo to grub.  All this over
a remote serial console (clearly I was out of my head).

So, I added warty (with universe) to sources.list, and dist-upgraded
everything.  Many, many conffile prompts later, only jabber had failed (I
think due to not having its init script upgraded), and since I wasn't using
it anyway, I purged it.  Then I installed linux-image-2.6-686, lvm2 and
grub, ran grub-install, and rebooted.

The system came up without a hitch, services intact, everything working, my
lvm1 volumes mounted via lvm2/device-mapper.  I was impressed!

So I started to review what I had installed which came from universe, and
trimmed a lot of obsolete junk.  Feeling lucky, I also decided to upgrade
from apache 1.3 -> apache2, and did so, which went swimmingly (trivial web
service, nothing fancy).  It's been running happily for hours since.

Packages which remain installed from universe (in approximate decreasing
order of importance):

dict
rpncalc
grepmail and its dependencies
libjpeg-progs, libjpeg-mmx-progs
ckermit (non-free)
units
dlocate

The source for libjpeg-progs is already in main, so I see no reason not to
add it to Supported immediately.  The others, I think, can wait for Hoary,
especially where there are additional dependencies involved.

-- 
 - mdz