Upgrade Debian 7 to 8

Virtualmin
1

Hello there,

I’m using Debian 7 but need to upgrade to Debian 8. I read the instructions from:

  1. https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html
  2. https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/os/debian-wheezy-to-jessie-distupgrade

In the instructions provided by virtualmin it’s not mentioned what to do with virtualmin repositories, so I comment them before upgrade.
Another thing not mentioned in the instructions is how to resolve config conflicts. I check all of them for apache config files, spamassassing config file, networking init.d file and accept the new versions. I make some notes to fix only spamassassin config.

After this I received there were problems with:

  1. apache2
  2. libapache2-mod-php5
  3. apache2-mod-php5
  4. apache2-mod-prefork
  5. mailman

I noticed there is no directory for enabled modules and all sites were disabled (listed only in sites available directory) and no mpm module was loaded. After fixing there problems (enable all modules + mpm-prefork and sites) and make small changes in site configurations (change to Require all granted) I started apache and it was working again. The problem was that php was not parsed and apache returns it as a text. I decide to upgrade virtualmin with hope it will check the configurations and will fix this problem. To upgrade virtualmin I just enable the new repositories and make apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. After this procedure virtualmin was updated but not fully working - and reporting that virtual host can not be configured to be executed as owner of the host because installed packages are from official debian repository (not from virtualmin repo) and the problem with php parsing still exits.

So my question is - is there someone else that upgraded Debian 7 to 8 and can it provide more detailed procedure. If there is no one can you tell me how to tell virtualmin to check and report for configuration problems and to install all required packages from it’s repository?

2

Here is some more info:

After opening virtualmin there is this error:

virtual-server::list_system_info failed : Undefined subroutine &net::active_interfaces called at /usr/share/webmin/virtual-server/virtual-server-lib-funcs.pl line 3617.

Here (http://www.virtualmin.com/node/37685) it’s written that this is theme problem but I changed the theme and it’s still here.

Sites are not working and this is in error-log file:

[Sun Sep 27 15:29:42.758443 2015] [fcgid:warn] [pid 3503] (104)Connection reset by peer: [client 93.219.127.156:33893] mod_fcgid: error reading data from FastCGI server
[Sun Sep 27 15:29:42.758493 2015] [core:error] [pid 3503] [client 93.219.127.156:33893] End of script output before headers: index.php

If someone can help me with this

3

Howdy,

Starting with the last problem you mentioned, about the sites not working – if you go into Server Configuration -> Website Options, try changing the PHP Execution Mode to “CGI”. That should generate some additional errors in the Apache error log, which will hopefully make it more clear why your websites are having issues.

-Eric

4

Hi Eric,

thank you for this suggestion. I will try it next time it’s possible. Now I’m trying to duplicate the server in virtual machine, so I can test upgrade without stopping the services.
I have other question related with this but it is for new thread.

5

Finally I migrate to Debian 8. It was not as planed (upgrade Debian 7 to Debian 8). Instead of this I used migrate procedure (https://virtualmin.com/documentation/system/migrate):

  1. Make full backup of the server
  2. Make backup with virtual min
virtualmin backup-domain --dest /root/backups/ --all-domains --all-features --newformat --all-virtualmin
  1. Install Debian 8 and virtualmin
  2. Restore everything

There were some problems restoring the domains:

  1. cp: error writing ‘/tmp/XXXX.tar.gz’: No space left on device - the space in /tmp was not enough to restore the domain. Because this is VPS server and I do not have control over /tmp (I can not see it as a separate mounted device) I used
mount --bind /var/tmpn /tmp
chmod 777 /tmp
chmod +t
  1. I have multiple databases for one of the domains that have foreign keys between them (https://www.virtualmin.com/node/38127) and virtualmin return an error trying to restore them. For this reason I restored everything with virtualmin except the databases. I restored the databases manually.
  2. Virtualmin backup database with multiple insert statements, so I applied this change
max_allowed_packet = 16M
  1. TLS was not enabled and there was a problem with receiving emails. To fix it I installed the certificate by going to ‘Server configuration -> Manage SSL Certificate’ and enable it for all services.

Hope this will help someone.