<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
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+ <item>
+ <title>Automatic upgrade testing from Lenny to Squeeze</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Automatic_upgrade_testing_from_Lenny_to_Squeeze.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 11 Jun 2010 22:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description>
+<p>The last few days I have done some upgrade testing in Debian, to
+see if the upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze will go smoothly. A few bugs
+have been discovered and reported in the process
+(<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/585410">#585410</a> in nagios3-cgi,
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584879">#584879</a> already fixed in
+enscript and <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/584861">#584861</a> in
+kdebase-workspace-data), and to get a more regular testing going on, I
+am working on a script to automate the test.</p>
+
+<p>The idea is to create a Lenny chroot and use tasksel to install a
+Gnome or KDE desktop installation inside the chroot before upgrading
+it. To ensure no services are started in the chroot, a policy-rc.d
+script is inserted. To make sure tasksel believe it to install a
+desktop on a laptop, the tasksel tests are replaced in the chroot
+(only acceptable because this is a throw-away chroot).</p>
+
+<p>A naive upgrade from Lenny to Squeeze using aptitude dist-upgrade
+currently always fail because udev refuses to upgrade with the kernel
+in Lenny, so to avoid that problem the file /etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
+is created. The bug report
+<a href="http://bugs.debian.org/566000">#566000</a> make me suspect
+this problem do not trigger in a chroot, but I touch the file anyway
+to make sure the upgrade go well. Testing on virtual and real
+hardware have failed me because of udev so far, and creating this file
+do the trick in such settings anyway. This is a
+<a href="http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/debian-26/failed-dist-upgrade-due-to-udev-config_sysfs_deprecated-nonsense-804130/">known
+issue</a> and the current udev behaviour is intended by the udev
+maintainer because he lack the resources to rewrite udev to keep
+working with old kernels or something like that. I really wish the
+udev upstream would keep udev backwards compatible, to avoid such
+upgrade problem, but given that they fail to do so, I guess
+documenting the way out of this mess is the best option we got for
+Debian Squeeze.</p>
+
+<p>Anyway, back to the task at hand, testing upgrades. This test
+script, which I call <tt>upgrade-test</tt> for now, is doing the
+trick:</p>
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+#!/bin/sh
+set -ex
+
+if [ "$1" ] ; then
+ desktop=$1
+else
+ desktop=gnome
+fi
+
+from=lenny
+to=squeeze
+
+exec &lt; /dev/null
+unset LANG
+mirror=http://ftp.skolelinux.org/debian
+tmpdir=chroot-$from-upgrade-$to-$desktop
+fuser -mv .
+debootstrap $from $tmpdir $mirror
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
+cat > $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d &lt;&lt;EOF
+#!/bin/sh
+exit 101
+EOF
+chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
+exit_cleanup() {
+ umount $tmpdir/proc
+}
+mount -t proc proc $tmpdir/proc
+# Make sure proc is unmounted also on failure
+trap exit_cleanup EXIT INT
+
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y install debconf-utils
+
+# Make sure tasksel autoselection trigger. It need the test scripts
+# to return the correct answers.
+echo tasksel tasksel/desktop multiselect $desktop | \
+ chroot $tmpdir debconf-set-selections
+
+# Include the desktop and laptop task
+for test in desktop laptop ; do
+ echo > $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test &lt;&lt;EOF
+#!/bin/sh
+exit 2
+EOF
+ chmod a+rx $tmpdir/usr/lib/tasksel/tests/$test
+done
+
+DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive
+DEBIAN_PRIORITY=critical
+export DEBIAN_FRONTEND DEBIAN_PRIORITY
+chroot $tmpdir tasksel --new-install
+
+echo deb $mirror $to main > $tmpdir/etc/apt/sources.list
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude update
+touch $tmpdir/etc/udev/kernel-upgrade
+chroot $tmpdir aptitude -y dist-upgrade
+fuser -mv
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>I suspect it would be useful to test upgrades with both apt-get and
+with aptitude, but I have not had time to look at how they behave
+differently so far. I hope to get a cron job running to do the test
+regularly and post the result on the web. The Gnome upgrade currently
+work, while the KDE upgrade fail because of the bug in
+kdebase-workspace-data</p>
+
+<p>I am not quite sure what kind of extract from the huge upgrade logs
+(KDE 167 KiB, Gnome 516 KiB) it make sense to include in this blog
+post, so I will refrain from trying. I can report that for Gnome,
+aptitude report 760 packages upgraded, 448 newly installed, 129 to
+remove and 1 not upgraded and 1024MB need to be downloaded while for
+KDE the same numbers are 702 packages upgraded, 507 newly installed,
+193 to remove and 0 not upgraded and 1117MB need to be downloaded</p>
+
+<p>I am very happy to notice that the Gnome desktop + laptop upgrade
+is able to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing and parallel
+booting without a hitch. Was unsure if there were still bugs with
+packages failing to clean up their obsolete init.d script during
+upgrades, and no such problem seem to affect the Gnome desktop+laptop
+packages.</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Skolelinux er laget for sentraldrifting, naturligvis</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Skolelinux_er_laget_for_sentraldrifting__naturligvis.html</link>
</description>
</item>
- <item>
- <title>Pieces of the roaming laptop puzzle in Debian</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Pieces_of_the_roaming_laptop_puzzle_in_Debian.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Wed, 19 May 2010 19:00:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description>
-<p>Today, the last piece of the puzzle for roaming laptops in Debian
-Edu finally entered the Debian archive. Today, the new
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-mklocaluser.html">libpam-mklocaluser</a>
-package was accepted. Two days ago, two other pieces was accepted
-into unstable. The
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/p/pam-python.html">pam-python</a>
-package needed by libpam-mklocaluser, and the
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/s/sssd.html">sssd</a> package
-passed NEW on Monday. In addition, the
-<a href="http://packages.qa.debian.org/libp/libpam-ccreds.html">libpam-ccreds</a>
-package we need is in experimental (version 10-4) since Saturday, and
-hopefully will be moved to unstable soon.</p>
-
-<p>This collection of packages allow for two different setups for
-roaming laptops. The traditional setup would be using libpam-ccreds,
-nscd and libpam-mklocaluser with LDAP or Kerberos authentication,
-which should work out of the box if the configuration changes proposed
-for nscd in <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/485282">BTS report
-#485282</a> is implemented. The alternative setup is to use sssd with
-libpam-mklocaluser to connect to LDAP or Kerberos and let sssd take
-care of the caching of passwords and group information.</p>
-
-<p>I have so far been unable to get sssd to work with the LDAP server
-at the University, but suspect the issue is some SSL/GnuTLS related
-problem with the server certificate. I plan to update the Debian
-package to version 1.2, which is scheduled for next week, and hope to
-find time to make sure the next release will include both the
-Debian/Ubuntu specific patches. Upstream is friendly and responsive,
-and I am sure we will find a good solution.</p>
-
-<p>The idea is to set up the roaming laptops to authenticate using
-LDAP or Kerberos and create a local user with home directory in /home/
-when a usre in LDAP logs in via KDM or GDM for the first time, and
-cache the password for offline checking, as well as caching group
-memberhips and other relevant LDAP information. The
-libpam-mklocaluser package was created to make sure the local home
-directory is in /home/, instead of /site/server/directory/ which would
-be the home directory if pam_mkhomedir was used. To avoid confusion
-with support requests and configuration, we do not want local laptops
-to have users in a path that is used for the same users home directory
-on the home directory servers.</p>
-
-<p>One annoying problem with gdm is that it do not show the PAM
-message passed to the user from libpam-mklocaluser when the local user
-is created. Instead gdm simply reject the login with some generic
-message. The message is shown in kdm, ssh and login, so I guess it is
-a bug in gdm. Have not investigated if there is some other message
-type that can be used instead to get gdm to also show the message.</p>
-
-<p>If you want to help out with implementing this for Debian Edu,
-please contact us on debian-edu@lists.debian.org.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
</channel>
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