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

[Whit Hansell]

Hi Bryan,
Thanks for the info...  Mucho appreciated... You've got the experience 
and I have a biggo' need.  You've been down the road before.   I might 
as well stay in your ruts as long as I can see you topping the next 
hill.   You're kind of runnin' interference for me, don'tja know.  :-)

I've learned a lot over the few years I've been messin' w. linux and the 
more I use it the more I just love it no matter what problems I run into.


Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> 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 ]
>
>   
I "skrew'd" up here.  I do NOT have a separate  boot and root.  It's all 
root, with /boot inside /.  And I increase the size of /, not /boot.  
But still it was too darn small.  My little mind got behind or ahead of 
my fingers when I spoke of a separate boot partition.  I have another 
drive(16G) not being used right now which does have a separate boot and 
root partitions.  For some reason my mind went to that drive 
composition.   Don't know why.  I know the difference between / and 
/boot, for cryin' out loud.  It's been a ruf" "cupple" weeks. :-[

> 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 ]
>
>   
My drive in the client is only a 20G and the server is a 40G, both IDE.  
I didn't increase the size of the / directory too much when I increased 
the size because I was pulling from /usr, I think, and wanted it to have 
as much as possible cuz' no tellin' what I'll want to add at a later 
date.  Altho' I will say that Debian is doing a very good job of having 
a very interesting and fat package management inventory.  They're adding 
stuff all the time.

'***
whit at brightsun:~$ df -h
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1             373M  257M   97M  73% /
tmpfs                 443M     0  443M   0% /lib/init/rw
udev                   10M   96K   10M   1% /dev
tmpfs                 443M     0  443M   0% /dev/shm
/dev/hda9             9.0G  4.6G  4.0G  54% /home
/dev/hda8             373M   11M  343M   3% /tmp
/dev/hda5             4.5G  3.1G  1.2G  73% /usr
/dev/hda6             2.8G  703M  2.0G  27% /var
192.168.0.102:/home/whit
                       29G   17G   11G  62% /mnt/nfsd,
'***
>> 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).
>
>   
Problems in stable have occurred but as you say, rarely.   That's what 
surprised me that it came back after the next dis-upgrade.  That showed 
it was a bug in the prior dist-upgrade somewhere or at least that's 
where I believe the problem was.  But you are right, stable is usually 
very stable and not a problem.
>   
>> 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.
>
>   
I haven't been able to keep up w. what they've done w. APT vs Aptitude.  
I guess I should try to find out which is still recommended by 
Debian.org, or maybe it doesn't matter anymore.  I'll try to find out.  
Thanks for letting me know that the developers had upgraded APT so much.

>   
>> 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.
Agreed.

Thanks again, a bunch for your help and posting on this.  I really do 
appreciate it.
Whit


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