25/01/2005
I don't know offhand, try looking in the manual
This is the third in a series of back-dated site updates that have only just got around to being published
172.21 Is Easier To Type Than 192.168
So yeah, eventually we get to the upgrading of caco to Debian Sarge. Right off I'd like to say this went a lot better than when I did baron. Whether this was due to the prior experience, or the simple fact that the class of open source software you'd find on a file server is just better than the class of open source software you have on desktops, is unknown. Anyway I sorted just about all the issues with baron's upgrade, or simple became accustomed to the changes.
Of course, one obvious issue is that unlike Woody, Sarge has no security updates yet. I put off upgrading for ages because of this. But, other people seem to get away with connecting a Sarge box to the internet, so I figured, what the hell. Hey, if the worst happens and caco gets cracked, who wouldn't find the irony eye-poppingly hilarious? I know I would!
As usual what I do when I upgrade a Debian box is I have a piece of paper and whenever the dist-upgrade process spits out an warning I write it down. Terminal flow control (^S/^Q or scroll lock if it works) helps here. Then I go through the list afterwards. The list mostly consists of merging changes into configuration files, anyway. There were only two things that were sufficiently nontrivial that I can actually remember them as I write this:
- Sometime between Woody and Sarge iptables had its init scripts deprecated. The package had this init script that would save and restore your iptables state over reboots, and the maintainer hated them. Obviously he's just taken them out. Now if you're upgrading it doesn't delete the files, so you could just carry on, but I took the opportunity to write my own
/etc/init.d/local-iptables(and/etc/init.d/local-tc, more on this later) - Debian's default mail transport agent is Exim. Exim v3 is obsolete; I think the only reason there are still Exim v3 packages in Sarge is that v3 and v4 configurations don't match and it's hard to do an automatic conversion. Exim v4 in Debian also has some frankly strange choices, for example it creates users with really stupidly long names containing capital letters. It just looks wrong, okay? So I took the opportunity to try Postfix. On the whole I'm pretty happy with it. It required next to no configuration besides answering Debconf questions. I guess the only obvious difference between Postfix and Exim v3 is that the former runs all the time like a real server but the latter, by default, runs from inetd. I don't know. Truth is I like Postfix but I don't know why...
Oh yeah, I changed my network numbering scheme at the same time.
