[tech] Mussel upgraded to Debian stable "jessie" 8.2

David Adam zanchey at ucc.gu.uwa.edu.au
Sun Nov 1 23:59:29 AWST 2015


With the clubroom pretty quiet due to exams, I took the opportunity this 
afternoon to upgrade Mussel to Debian "jessie" 8.2.

Mussel is probably our cruftiest machine and it is something of a 
workhorse, so I can understand why nobody else has been keen to tackle it 
so far.

The release notes for the upgrade were very helpful; I started by removing 
a lot of unused packages, such as a variety of X display managers, and 
obsolete services.

The system did run out of disk space about half way through, but with 
[BOB]'s assistance the virtual disk image has been resized. FreeRADIUS, 
OpenLDAP and jabberd2 required quite a bit of work but are working fine 
now.

The main remaining issue is that suPHP was removed from the Debian 
distribution as it is not actively maintained. I am not keen on running 
mod_php for user directories without it; there's too much risk in the PHP 
running in other contexts (e.g. cacti, Roundcube, etc.). For now, I've 
disabled PHP code in user home directories (see mods-enabled/php5.conf).

I'll try and work out an alternative in the next few days, although others 
are most welcome to take a look.

Merlo and Mooneye are the only remaining machines that are candidates for 
upgrades soon, so that might be worth looking in to. As they don't have a 
remote console I think they'd be better off being done from the clubroom.

David Adam
UCC Wheel Member
zanchey@


More information about the tech mailing list