February 2020 - BALUG-Admin

BALUG VM Debian oldstable --> stable
by Michael Paoli 22 Feb '20

22 Feb '20

The BALUG.org Virtual Machine (VM) balug / balug-sf-lug-v2.balug.org which also hosts most all things, not only BALUG.org, but also SF-LUG.org (excepting it's lists) and BerkeleyLUG.com, I'm intending to upgrade the operating system soon. Expecting some modest outages with some service restarts and reboots, etc. But expecting for the most part it will remain up. I did also earlier upgrade "vicki" https://lists.balug.org/pipermail/balug-admin/2020-February/001016.html just fine, and also successfully completed a dry run test upgrade: created LVM snapshot of the running balug VM, copied snapshot to LVM volume, built VM around that volume - and configured to be highly similar to balug (differing only in Ethernet MAC address and VM related UUID(s) and name and networking (different subnet/network/vLAN)), disabled network link at VM before "powering up" the VM, reconfigured network so as to not conflict with balug, disabled services (most especially anything that would attempt to send email), enabled network link and networking, went through the full upgrade process - all went well, no issues of any significance encountered. Anyway, now I move on to the "real deal" (the actual balug VM). I'll report if any significant issues come up - otherwise presume all has gone fine and the upgrade will be completed soon (likely today).

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"vicki" host upgrade report: Debian GNU/Linux x86_64: 9.11 (stretch) to 10.2 (buster)
by Michael Paoli 10 Feb '20

10 Feb '20

So, starting on 2020-01-31 I upgraded the "vicki" host (physical: Supermicro PDSMi) from: Debian GNU/Linux 9.11 (stretch) x86_64 to: Debian GNU/Linux 10.2 (buster) x86_64 vicki is the host that's the occasional* host that hosts the balug Virtual Machine (VM) - that VM hosts most all things: BALUG.org SF-LUG.org (excepting list(s)) BerkeleyLUG.com (and excepting DNS slaves thereof) *occasional - vicki mostly hosts the BALUG VM when it's not otherwise being hosted on its nominal host (which is much quieter and has significantly more RAM, but alas, is a laptop, and semi-regularly ventures out or is otherwise unavailable for hosting the balug VM - hence the VM typically live migrates first to vicki on such occasions, and then back again when the nominal host is available again). The (rather loud, and power hungry) vicki hosts spends most of its time powered off when it's not hosting the balug VM. And the upgrade ... mostly was done live and went mostly quite smoothly. Here are the slight bits that took a little more/additional attention: apt[-get] autoremove - After the upgrade, apt[-get] was suggesting using autoremove to remove a bunch of "no longer needed" stuff. I reviewed the list, most of it was fine/routine (e.g. lots of libraries - which would otherwise remain if that dependent upon them also remained), ... but some bits of it weren't, e.g. bridge-utils (notably at least, I sometimes use brctl, and it may also be used by ifup/ifdown and friends, and/or libvirt). There may have been a small number of packages other than that, which autoremove would've defaulted to removing, but which I opted to retain. After suitably adjusting the status of those (so apt[-get] would show them as explicitly requested rather than just brought in to satisfy some dependency(/ies), proceeded fine with the autoremove (with --purge - the relevant pre-upgrade backups were done, so no need to otherwise explicitly retain configs for packages being removed). libvirt - live migration from of VM from Debian GNU/Linux 9.11 (stretch) x86_64 to: Debian GNU/Linux 10.2 (buster) x86_64 worked fine, but trying to live migrate back failed. Found and corrected issue to allow backwards compatibility to Stretch, from the (hand maintained for human(s)) logs: To allow live migration back to Debian 9.x without apparmor, in file /etc/libvirt/qemu.conf changed: security_driver = "selinux" to: #security_driver = "selinux" ##### security_driver = "none" ##### and restarted libvirtd I did end up rebooting the VM after making that change though. Although the live migration to Buster had added the different security bit, I wasn't able to quickly and easily determine a way to live remove that. But the balug VM was long overdue for a reboot anyway (not on latest security kernel update, likewise older libraries/binaries still in process RAM from long-running daemon processes, etc.), so rebooted, as the expedient way to both address that and the apparmor bit that Buster had dragged into the running VM. Was then able to live migrate back to Stretch without issue. That was basically it, no other issues of note bumped into (did review the install and release notes documentation, did first cover relevant items from there - most notably network device names - and having covered that first avoided any surprises on that).

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BALUG: Lists, stats, etc.
by Michael Paoli 01 Feb '20

01 Feb '20

dates, lists, number of members: YYYY-MM-DD announce talk admin 2020-02-01 841 271 34 2020-01-01 841 271 34 2019-12-01 841 271 34 2019-11-01 840 271 34 2019-10-01 842 271 34 2019-09-01 844 272 34 2019-08-01 847 272 34 2019-07-01 852 272 36 2019-06-01 854 273 37 2019-05-01 856 272 38 2019-04-01 853 273 38 2019-03-01 851 273 38 2019-02-01 853 273 38 2019-01-01 856 274 38 2018-12-01 858 274 38 2018-11-01 861 274 39 2018-10-02 862 274 39 2018-09-01 864 274 38 2018-07-28 866 278 38 2018-06-08 870 282 38 2018-04-28 875 282 38 2018-02-17 880 283 36 2017-11-04 883 284 36 2017-08-19 897 293 37 2017-07-01 897 297 38 2017-05-27 897 297 38 2017-05-16 897 296 38 2017-04-01 896 297 38 2017-03-30 885 297 38 2016-05-03 886 291 39 2016-04-03 887 290 39 2016-03-05 888 291 45 2016-01-05 887 295 45 2015-12-05 887 296 45 2015-11-07 887 301 45 2015-10-06 888 301 45 2015-09-05 887 301 45 2015-08-04 888 301 45 2015-07-03 888 300 45 2015-06-05 888 301 46 2015-05-02 885 298 45 2015-04-04 884 297 44 2015-03-07 886 298 44 2015-02-06 885 303 44 2015-01-07 885 304 45 2014-12-06 886 304 45 2014-11-01 884 302 45 2014-10-04 881 303 46 2014-09-06 878 309 44 2014-06-13 875 307 44 2014-05-02 874 306 44 2014-04-04 876 306 44 2014-03-01 876 306 43 2014-01-11 872 305 42 2013-10-05 854 293 40 2013-08-31 855 295 41 2013-07-20 852 297 40 2013-04-10 838 286 41 2013-03-03 841 289 41 2013-02-02 843 291 41 2012-12-15 845 310 41 2012-03-23 818 310 39 2012-02-01 813 307 40 2011-04-28 768 291 37 2011-02-27 762 288 36 2010-05-02 730 289 34 2010-04-01 727 291 33 2010-03-16 727 293 33 2009-12-16 716 290 33 2009-09-09 700 288 32 2009-03-27 677 287 29 2009-01-10 662 290 30 2008-08-17 635 290 29 2008-03-03 571 247 28 2008-01-02 337 260 28 2007-12-28 336 261 28 2007-09-03 264 258 27 2007-07-24 287 256 27 2007-06-17 280 249 27 references: http://www.balug.org/#Lists

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