[Leaplist] Lose server after a few hours....

[Bryan J. Smith]

Whit Hansell <skipper44 at comcast.net> wrote:
> ...
> But it could have also been a problem I had w. the client
> already.  I did not mention it because I didn't think it
> had anything to do w. the server problem at all.   The
> client did not finish it's last dist-upgrade because the
> boot partition was full and it told me I had to do a
> "dpkg -- configure -a" to fix it but really I had
> to figure out how to in crease the size of the partition.  I
> had never used Gparted before so had to figure out how to do
> that too.   Got it done and did my "confure" command and it's
> all ok but again, it's taken time to do.

I'm the last person to push my "eccentric" ways on anyone,
but I've basically adopted the following attitude over the last
5-7 years ...

1.  No separate /boot from root (/)
[ Yes, that means for LVM, root (/) is outside of it ]

2.  2x Mem <= swap = root (/), /tmp and /var (if separate)
[ typically 8-16GiB nowdays, previously 2-4GiB ]

You need enough /var to do any full APT dist-upgrade or
YUM upgrade (w/release package change).  If /var is not
separate from root, then really make it 8GiB minimum these
days.  But on a server, they are always separate for me.

[ Yes, this some 32GiB+ for swap, root, /tmp and /var
takes away from data space, but is well worth it ]

> So, I had did my new dist-upgrade to the server and
> it's OK.  Did my Gparted to the client and configured it
> as explained above and it's working fine.
> Then I got the latest dist-upgrade for the client done and
> it did just fine w. no problems.

APT usually does many things fine.  For Debian, with their
strong packaging guidelines, let alone on a release, you should
rarely have issues (I've never seen such on a stable release).

> I don't know what the problem was w. the server but the
> new upgrade seemed to fix it.

Not having a complete initramfs and other, support
files in /boot can cause issues.  Not having enough in /var
during the operation can make things even worse too.

> Bryan, I've done the dist-upgrade since soon after I
> started the LUGS because I had seen it recommended to do
> that instead of the straight upgrade.  I also use aptitude
> instead of apt as it is recommended to do so by Debian.org.

I've noted those recommendations, but it varies as newer
versions of APT have those same features.

> You thot' it odd that the kernel image would be
> upgraded w/o a major situation.

Actually, with the release version change, anything is
possible when it comes to absolutely required, base packages.


-- 
Bryan J Smith          Professional, Technical Annoyance
b.j.smith at ieee.org    http://www.linkedin.com/in/bjsmith
--------------------------------------------------------
I don't have a "favorite Linux distro."  I use, develop
and support community efforts, often built around Linux.
Technology and solutions are my focus, not dragging in
assumptions, marketing and other concepts which dominate
non-community developed software, which I left long ago.


-- 
This message has been scanned for viruses and
dangerous content by MailScanner, and is
believed to be clean.