[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@
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