We would like to update the psf machine to Squeeze. What is the best procedure for that?

Hi Martin

We are busy upgrading all our servers to Squeeze. I've asked Izak to
move the psf machine up in the queue, so maybe we can squeeze it in
some time this week :-)

Last time we made a copy and did a dist-upgrade on that, because we
were scared :-) The upgrade went smoothly and I recall someone made
comments about just winging it and fixing things if they go wrong.

This time I'd probably go with the winging approach. There is a
somewhat large change in the way debian boots, with the new events
based boot system. It works ALMOST flawlessly on a virtual setup such
as this, except for one small problem, none of the sysinit scripts
(those you normally find in /etc/rcS.d) are run, it only runs the
scripts in rc3.d. Luckily there is only about three of those scripts
that are actually important for a virtual server (setting the
hostname, updating /etc/mtab) so this is a simple "patch" that needs
to be made. Also, any of your own init scripts that you may have
written must now have the commented LSB dependency lines at the top. I
did not check it, perhaps you already have it, I just have to mention
it.

regards,
Izak

Another avenue I want to explore, is to check if a newer version of
debian's vserver kernel can do ipv6. If it can, and since we only run
psf and one other server on that machine, it would make sense to do
this as well. I'll keep you posted.

Some feedback on ipv6.

Piecing this together, starting with this line from linux-vserver.org:

1. Starting with linux-vserver-2.3 IPv6 support is included in the
main source code. No need to apply any extra patches. You will need to
have util-vserver 0.30.214 or newer if you are using the 2.3+ patches.

2. Heading over to the changelog for the kernel in squeeze
(http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/l/linux-2.6/linux-2.6_2.6.32-41/changelog.txt)
shows it includes the patch 2.6.32.48-vs2.3.0.36.29.8. That is from
the 2.3 development branch.

3. Ergo, linux-vserver in Debian squeeze has native ipv6 support.

4. Squeeze also has util-vserver 0.30.216, which is new enough.

We can therefore implement ipv6 this time round, provided I upgrade
nina (the host) first.

I upgraded the host (nina), resulting in some but very little
downtime. I also obtained an ipv6 subnet. Its ipv6 address will
probably be 2a01:4f8:131:2484::3. To be confirmed once the rest has
been done.

Upgrading the actual virtual host is next.

regards,
Izak

> Upgrading the actual virtual host is next.

I should be available most of the day tomorrow. So if you can fix a UTC
time, I can try to be available. Else you proceed at your own pace, and
we'll clean up afterwards.

> Upgrading the actual virtual host is next.

I notified python-dev about the upcoming outage.

Re: init scripts. I added LSB headers to /etc/init.d/roundup
(from the Debian package), and disabled spambayes altogether.

Hi again,

The psf virtual host has been upgraded to Debian squeeze, and the
necessary changes has been made to make it start with the new
dependency based init. I also had to change /etc/init.d/roundup,
because /bin/sh is now provided by dash and it does not understand
"source" among others. I simply changed the bit at the top to say
/bin/bash, since that is what it really wants.

I assigned an ipv6 address to the virtual host. It does not work yet,
I need to implement some kind of routing and this seems to be
sufficiently different to ipv4 that I'm not certain how to do it just
yet.

An upgrade from postgresql 8.3 to 8.4 will also be required at some
point. It is possible to run them side by side, all that is required
is to dump it in 8.3 and load it in 8.4.

regards,
Izak

On Wed, Mar 28, 2012 at 12:25 AM, Martin v. Löwis
<metatracker@psf.upfronthosting.co.za> wrote:
>
> Re: init scripts. I added LSB headers to /etc/init.d/roundup
> (from the Debian package), and disabled spambayes altogether.

I can help with porting these to Supervisor.

I have now run pg_upgradecluster. At first it would fail because it ran out of disk space. I deleted old log files and backups and seefeld's copy of roundup, so postgres upgrading eventually succeeded.

It turned out that I also had to reindex all instance (see issue443).

With that, it seems that the upgrade is complete. Thanks for your help.

Hi again,

I discovered the Hetzner Wiki with the details on how to set up ipv6
properly. It appears to work now. The ipv6 address for bugs.python.org
is:

2a01:4f8:131:2480::3

regards,
Izak

I have now edited /etc/apache2/ports.conf, /etc/ssh/sshd_config, and /etc/postfix/main.cf to enable IPv6.

For Postfix, I would appreciate a review of the changes; I added inet_protcols and edited inet_interfaces and mynetworks.

I also put the name into DNS.

On Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 5:45 PM, Martin v. Löwis
<metatracker@psf.upfronthosting.co.za> wrote:
> For Postfix, I would appreciate a review of the changes; I added inet_protcols and edited inet_interfaces and mynetworks.

I'm not much of an ipv6 expert, but what I see looks like the
equivalent of $myipaddress/32 in ipv4 land, and is therefore in order.

One other note: On linux you unfortunately need to set up firewalling
for ipv4 and ipv6 seperately. We have a very nice ipv4 firewall in
place, but there is no ipv6 firewall. This is not really a big
problem, because nothing listens on ipv6 other than the services we
want open anyway, but it could affect future services, one should
always bind to localhost explicitly.