[tech] Machines upgraded to Debian 7.0 (Wheezy) & Merlo disks

[David Adam]

Both last weekend and this weekend, a number of machines have been 
upgraded to Debian 7.0 "Wheezy" - Mussel, Motsugo, Mylah, Murasoi, Merlo, 
Mooneye, and Mollitz. Heathred was already running the testing versions of 
Wheezy and is now stabilised on 7.0 as well.

All machines have been rebooted and have new kernels, including a fix for 
the rather nasty CVE-2013-2094. PostgreSQL and MySQL are running on the 
new versions; OpenLDAP has been upgraded.

Medico remains on Debian 6.0 (Squeeze), because [BOB] threatened to break 
my fingers if I fiddled with his precious Proxmox install.

There were a few hiccups along the way, mostly caused by old packages and 
config scripts. Many old packages have been removed. kexec is pure 
insanity.

I enlarged Mussel's root partition during the reboot (Xen paravirtualised 
disks don't support this online).

---

The following issues are outstanding AFAIK:

Murasoi: The syslog-ng configuration format has changed AGAIN and it is 
complaining, though still working. We should update it.

Mussel: The default webmail interface, horde3, has been killed off 
upstream and in Debian. The replacement horde4 isn't stabilised yet. For 
now, I have copied the contents of the packages to /usr/local/horde3 and 
it still works, but Horde is terrible. We should either work out how to 
migrate everyone from Horde to SoGo, or install and test horde4.

There are still lots of obsolete packages installed on the machines that 
have been around for a while; careful removal might help in the long term.

---

One of the more amusing problems was that Merlo refused to install the new 
version of grub, as the loader and support for both RAID and LVM didn't 
fit in the 512 bytes in front of the first partition. Today, I split the 
RAID and repartitioned the disks before reforming the RAID. Merlo now 
boots fine (thanks to [TPG] for getting it running with a USB stick) and 
incredibly all the disk stuff could be done online.

Thanks to [MRD], [BOB], [TPG], [GOZ], [TRS] and [MSH] for helping to break 
and fix things respectively.

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au