[plug] Looking for assistance with a recent Debian upgrade

[Brad Campbell]

On 20/12/19 9:22 am, Joe Aquilina wrote:
> Will be doing my backups first, starting straight after everyone else 
> goes home early for their Christmas break at about lunchtime. I found 
> that crossgrading page late yesterday - printed it ready for the weekend.
> 
> Planning on upgrading the kernel first and making sure that it boots and 
> runs ok with a newer kernel first before I attempt the crossgrade.

That is the best plan. The x64 kernel has had i386 syscall emulation for 
pretty much forever. I never bumped into a compatibility issue.

> We are effectively closed until January 6 so I have plenty of time to 
> get this done before everyone else returns to work (I am only taking the 
> few days between Christmas and New Year).
> 

So there are a couple of gotchas I got caught with following the 
instructions on that page.

Bash / Dash got removed before the new one was installed and dpkg shat 
the bed. I scp'd a 64 bit bash binary from another machine and 
softlinked sh to bash in /bin to get it going then did a reinstall of 
bash/dash.

Some perl modules didn't upgrade properly and I had to manually install 
them again.

I was caught with some dependencies on the old -pae kernel and had to 
forcibly remove the kernel package to clean it up.

grub-pc was removed and not automatically reinstalled. It did ask me if 
I wanted to remove it as that's not the brightest thing to do, but I 
just made sure the x64 version was installed and configured manually 
before I rebooted.

Other than the packages and dependencies needing some installation 
assistance, no configuration changes were required and I didn't have to 
manually tweak anything else.

If I were doing it again I'd make sure I had 64 bit binaries of bash, 
rsync, ssh/scp lying around as a get out of jail free card.

That was my last i386 based machine though, so I won't be doing it again.


-- 
An expert is a person who has found out by his own painful
experience all the mistakes that one can make in a very
narrow field. - Niels Bohr