The insidious urge to fix what ain’t broke has arisen. I’ll probably follow the official documentation, unless someone has a better suggestion.
I’m not running anything unusual and I haven’t done much, if any, “customization”. I update packages maybe a couple of times a week, so they’re current.
Should I go ahead and put myself through this now, or wait until support is dropped and I’m forced?
I upgraded 50 boxes from 9 to 13 last week.
The two dovecot were the most work. Some guacd had trouble with file permissions and I had to manually install and enable a few php8.4 packages and manually apply powerdns db migration scripts.
Oh, powerdns renamed master/slave to primary/secondary, too.
I snapshot my machine, set it to go overnight, went to bed. Woke up, 24% done “Do you want to use the package maintainer’s version?”. Grr. Went smooth though.
Most of my infra is Debian, and I did it without serious incident:
#Update everything to latest apt update && apt upgrade && apt full-upgrade && apt --purge autoremove reboot #Verify that debian_version is 12.x (STOP IF NOT 12!) cat /etc/debian_version #Check for any pinned or held packages apt list '?narrow(?installed, ?not(?origin(Debian)))' apt-mark showhold #Swap bookworm for trixie in repo files sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list.d/* #Carry out update apt update apt upgrade --without-new-pkgs -y apt full-upgrade -y reboot #Verify that debian_version is 13.x cat /etc/debian_version #Modernize apt sources to v3 apt modernize-sources -yAnd then maybe apt update to make sure the updates still work OK.
Sometimes you have to make changes to certain repos that don’t have Trixie manifests, but that’s easy enough to roll back.
apt modernize-sources -y
Thanks for this - I hadn’t seen it yet in the docs I’ve been looking at.
No idea what it does, but it looks legit, so I’ll run it!Apt v3 comes with some quality-of-life stuff that apt has been direly missing for years, and one of those is apt sources that make sense to a human.
So the new apt source files have local key location, components, suites, and Uris.
The sources from the before-time just had a one-liner with a uri and some components.
Edit:also the modernize command makes a backup of the source files it touches.
How much pain you should expect is easily answered: Expect several things to break and having to do a full reinstall. So back up everything first.
It will probably not happen, but you should always expect the worst (out of the realistic at least…) outcome and be prepared.
Just be careful if you use Dovecot MDA, as it’s configuration files format changed. There’s a nice guide on dovecot’s documentation covering this change.
I’ve yolo’d every major upgrade from debian 8 to 13 without any backups of configs and survived… (dont do that though)
For most desktop systems where you’re not dicking around with files in /etc, there is almost no pain ever
For servers, dealing with the “do you want to install the maintainers version of ____.conf”, sucks… trying to remember all the things i put in php.ini is a pain
Probably skill issue
0.076
Update when you can afford downtime. The update should be painless but you know how it is: things go crazy when they shouldn’t. Every time.
The upgrade itself is never a problem.
The real problem is when your server is running an old software that breaks after the update.
For example I had an old php/drupal site and it broke after upgrading debian because the upgrade also updated php to a newer version that is not supported by that old version of drupal.
This is where docker becomes a godsend
I updated NAS, VPS and Raspberry Pis not so long ago. All when smooth and without issue.
I remember it being none, i modified my app source to pount to the newer release codebame, then
apt update && apt upgrade. I had everything as a container on my minipc and no extreem modifications to the base OS to make my upgrades (both software and hardware) as easier as possible.Make sure linux headers stay installed. Mine didn’t for some reason and then zfs dkms didn’t compile anymore. All I had to do was install it again, though, so the googling why it didn’t compile was the hard part. The boot disk was luckily just ext.
On a normal setup without leads or crazy customisation, it’ll be a breeze 👍
Annecdata here, but I didn’t have any significant problems on like 5 servers. I recall there being one minor edge case, but I don’t remember what it was (sorry). But other than that it was really easy. Even my nvidia drivers continued to work (for cuda, not GUI), which was really surprising. ZFS, docker, ssh, nfs, etc. all continued to work without any problems.
If you want to do a test run, create a 12 VM and install your same package list, then upgrade it and see what happens. That could take as little as an hour to do, but more likely a few hours if you want to really take time to inspect everything after the upgrade.
I update my servers very promptly and have never had a problem with a version jump. Apt handles this well.
Backup your data: the stuff you can’t just reconstruct.
The go for it. Worst comes to worst: reconstruct the system and applications and reimport the data.
If you have capacity: do it in a VM first.
