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Debian “Lenny” 5.0 Released

Finally after 2 years running Debian “Etech” 4.0 the new version Debian 5.0 codename “Lenny” has been released. The new release is dedicated to Thiemo Seufer, a Debian Developer who dies on December 26th, 2008 in a tragic car accident. Read more information about “Lenny” on the Debian homepage.

As you know only the early bird catches the worm, I immediately decided to update one server to Lenny. Sure, sometimes the worm isn’t delicious but if you are dealing with IT stuff you will know this kind of bad tasting worms already.

Okay the good news are: The worm wasn’t bad tasting in this case. Find my upgrade report below.

Upgrade Procedure

First I started with:

apt-get update

And received the error message:

There are no public key available for the following key IDs: 4D270D06F42584E6

Which means we need to get a new public key:

gpg --recv-key --keyserver wwwkeys.eu.pgp.net 4D270D06F42584E6
gpg --export 4D270D06F42584E6 | apt-key add -

or optionally with (not tested):

apt-get install debian-archive-keyring

Fine, next apt-get update was done again and several packages have been updated. It was prompted if a new /etc/mysql/my.cnf should be installed or my old one should be kept. I decided to keep my old one.

Afterwards I upgraded the distribution with apt-get dist-upgrade and many packages have been downloaded and installed.

For several config files it is again prompted if the old one should be kept or overwritten. I decided to backup to old configuration files and overwrite them with the new ones from the current distribution. I wanted to make sure that I don’t run into conflicts. Using this way the upgrade is performed very quick.

In the next step I adapted all my changes from backuped config files into the new ones. In my case mainly the Apache2 and MySQL configurations.

Apache2

After doing this Apache2 started with the message “NameVirtualHost *:80 has no VirtualHosts” and no one of my virtual hosts was recognized. I resolved this issue by changing the file /etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default and /etc/apache2/ports.conf. Within both files I’ve changed declarations “*:80″ to “*”:

/etc/apache2/sites-enabled/000-default

<VirtualHost *>

/etc/apache2/ports.conf

NameVirtualHost *

Note that all your virtual host configurations also have to be defined with “<VirtualHost * >”.

APT

To receive the updates for “Lenny” edit the file /etc/apt/sources.conf and change the line:

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates main contrib non-free

to

deb http://security.debian.org/ lenny/updates main contrib non-free

Grub

One special thing on my server here (Strato root server) is the Grub configuration. The server is configured with SATA RAID 1, therefore partitions are mounted on /dev/md0 and /dev/md1. After every kernel update I manually change the /boot/grub/menu.lst file. Here I copy the two parts for the latest running kernel and simply adjust the kernel versions:

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel (2.6.26-1-686)
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/md1 ro console=tty0 console=ttyS                   0,57600
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686
savedefault
boot

title           Debian GNU/Linux, kernel (2.6.26-1-686, recovery mode)
root            (hd0,0)
kernel          /vmlinuz-2.6.26-1-686 root=/dev/md1 ro console=tty0 console=ttyS                   0,57600 single
initrd          /initrd.img-2.6.26-1-686
savedefault
boot

Finally reboot and your issue will show “Debian GNU/Linux 5.0″.