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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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
On a normal setup without leads or crazy customisation, it’ll be a breeze 👍
I updated NAS, VPS and Raspberry Pis not so long ago. All when smooth and without issue.
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.
Is it painful? I’ve upgraded several versions without difficulty. “third party” repositories are problematic so be sure you follow the guidelines about disabling them.
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.
For the most part, it’s pretty painless. Unless you have a super complex setup you’ll be fine.
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.
The official docs have everything, though not as well ordered and concise as they could be.
I’ve taken my server from 11 to 12 to 13. Only issue was 11->12 where backports caused some issue that I no longer remember the specifics of (never broke SSH link), so I just don’t fuck with backports anymore. You need to have your shit together for backports, from what I’ve gathered.
12->13 was abs smooth as butter. Extra 3rd party repos weren’t even an issue. One I had to leave “bookworm” because they didn’t have trixie entries; I found it had no trixie entry by looking at the repo itself - it just kept working no problem after the upgrade anyway.
And I have a “stretch” repo I took from 12 to 13 on another server (it’s mongoDB 4.4 for unifi, an abs shitshow of software those bozos cook up)Anyway tldr docs are good narry a problem will occur.
I’ve found that dist upgrades themselves are fine, but it usually breaks something. Last time it was my janky WordPress installation which was using PHP 7.4. The wordpress version was up to date but it wouldn’t use the installed 8.2 php and just broke. In the end I installed a fresh wordpress and copied the data over.
The trick is to get wordpress from debian’s repos itself. That way your wordpress is managed by debian and receives automatic security updates.
The fewer packages you have installed, the easier it is to upgrade. So if your stuff is containerized, upgrade should be mostly painless.
In my history at least, dist-upgrades have never themselves been a problem, not even when doing such things as a x86-to-x64 crossgrade upgrade (from Stretch to Buster, back in the time). The problem usually comes right after, with the first reboot, when something does not generate correctly in Grub or the new kernel’s initramfs is lacking a specific module, or a given mariadb flag you were counting on is no longer added by default, or somesuch. So always have a rescue boot ready.
