[plug] Looking for assistance with a recent Debian upgrade

[Joe Aquilina]

On 20/12/19 10:26 am, Brad Campbell wrote:
> 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.

I expect that this will be the one and only time I will need to an i386 
to amd64 crossgrade, this is the only machine that we have that needs 
it. All our other production machines are all amd64, mostly Kubuntu 
18.04 LTS and one other running Debian buster.

Would I be correct in thinking that, if necessary, I could simply copy 
64 bit binaries of bash, rsync etc from the other Debian buster amd64 
system onto the machine I will be crossgrading? That seems to be what 
you mentioned above that you did.

>
>
Cheers.

Joe Aquilina

-- 
Joe Aquilina
Central Chemical Consulting Pty Ltd
PO Box 2546 Malaga WA 6944 Australia
1/11 Narloo St Malaga 6090 Australia
Tel: +61  8 9248 2739  Fax: +61  8 9248 2749
joe at chem.com.au  www.chem.com.au