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Debian Freezing
An anonymous reader wrote in to alert us to that fact that
Debian is scheduled to Freeze this weekend. Soon there shall be spuds for everyone. This of course means that I will continue to recklessly apt-get upgrade on my laptop with reckless disregard for the safety of anyone within a 20 yard radius of my sofa.
I have to try this:
:)
1. Get a (real) potato
2. Put it in liquid Nitrogen for about an hour
3. Drop it.
I expect it'll be pretty shatter resistant, just like the debian potato. I shall report here
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
for those running Slink who don't want to destroy their system.
Hope this helps (and don't let those spud gun pellets moulder down the side of the sofa)...
--
Xenu loves you!
There's not a precise equivalent to Kickstart; what I would do, if I wanted 13 identical boxes, would be:
- Pick one box as a "master," and install everything that you want installed on it.
- Then, add
/var/cache/apt/archives to /etc/exports so that it gets exported to other machines that want it. - Install the "base" Debian stuff (about 6 floppies worth of stuff) on those other machines.
- Copy over some base networking files ( e.g. -
/etc/hosts , /etc/fstab and such) and drop them into place so that each machine has some basic common configuration. - Mount the relevant filesystems on the remote machines, and then have them install via: # dpkg -i
/mnt/common-apt-cache/*.deb - It would make a lot of sense to either build a
.deb package containing any common config scripts/files or provide a common NFS-mounted "export" directory like the "apt package archive" as a conduit to push stuff to the remote boxes. - Set up a cron job on each box that (let's say) runs a script in
/mnt/common-config/ that installs any .deb files in /mnt/common-apt-cache/ that are less than a day old (or check against what's installed).
This is definitely no harder to automate on Debian than it is on RPM-based distributions, and could actually be easier as you could set up a local "package archive" for the whole set of packages and use apt-get hitting a local server rather than a remote one to keep all of the packages up-to-date with what you want on them.I would mount my Debian CD on a separate box and download via HTTP; this has the result of pushing all the packages that got installed into /var/cache/apt/archives
I would tend to want to use cfengine for this; I have yet to get it configured to distribute files itself, which is something it claims to be able to do...
Inserting extra needed lines in config files like /etc/fstab is the sort of thing that cfengine is ideal for...
This gets all the machines to have the "common" stuff.
I would most definitely try to implement this using cfengine as it's designed to do this sort of thing...
Look at cfengine; the Usenix journal ;login has had a series on it recently; it is really powerful.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Basically the point is that some (me included) don't want to freeze without working boot-floppies (the installation program suite, for those not too deep into Debian) and with a lot of new packages stuck in Incoming.
(Yes, I am leaking information here. But my intention is to fix another lack, because a leak of correct information is IMHO better than a leak of misinformation.
I just finished reading the distribution howto by Eric Raymond - mostly because I've been thinking about switching distributions. The one thing that made me really sad is Eric's comments about the Redhat Package Manager, "The big selling point of this distribution is RPM, the Red Hat Package Manager. This piece of software is a remarkable advance; it allows you to cleanly install and de-install applications and operating-system components, including the kernel and OS base itself. RPM is now used as well by essentially all other distributions except Debian."
.deb?! Why did these two great distributions make their package management systems so proprietary? Not in the sense of non-openness, but in the sense that other distributions having to rely on Redhat or Debian for their package management systems.
What bothered me was the name of the Redhat Package Manager. If Redhat wanted everyone to use it why not seperate itself from the product name. Anyways, I noticed that many other distributions do use rpms. It makes me equally sad that Debian, seemingly, has a more advanced package deployment, grouping system - but they had to go and make the extension
Oh wo is me. When will the LSB do something?
This is all probably flame-baiting, off-topic nonsense. Someone point me to slackware, are they still using tar.gz as their package managing system?
Joseph Elwell.
Date: Tue, 2 Nov 1999 23:36:59 +0100
From: Richard Braakman
To: debian-devel-announce@lists.debian.org
Subject: Status of Potato
(Please send followups to debian-devel, not debian-devel-announce)
Potato looks ready to freeze. Its primary goals have been achieved,
and the only things left to do are to finish the bootdisks and fix
lots of bugs. I think it is advisable to freeze now, before we
start major new developments in potato.
Last weekend has shown that the bug count can be reduced rapidly
in intense sessions. We'll need more of those, and probably a large
number of packages will also have to be removed from frozen.
The freeze will be the coming weekend, on Sunday, November 7th.
Before the freeze, we will have to deal with the backlog in Incoming
somehow. There are more than 200 packages in it now and it's growing.
Help is on the way, but probably not in time. In any case, I do not
think it is wise to install a hundred new packages just before the
freeze! My plan is to handle all the packages that fix bugs, and
leave the rest for the new unstable.
After the freeze, I expect it will take a week or two for frozen to
settle down. A lot of bugs can be fixed in that time. This period
will be similar to the traditional freeze.
Then we can start with Test Cycles. These will address the problems
we had with the previous two freezes. A Test Cycle looks like this:
1. Boot disks and CD images are created.
2. The distribution is tested for a fixed amount of time. No changes
of any kind will be made to frozen during this time. Fixes for
problems that are discovered will of course be prepared, but they
will not be installed yet.
3. The results are evaluated. If the distribution is good enough to
release, it is released as it is.
4. Otherwise, fixes are installed, and if necessary, extra time is
taken to fix the problems.
5. New boot disks and CD images are created, and the cycle begins again.
Richard Braakman
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?
-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon? :P)
(If you can't figure out how to E-Mail me, Don't.
I had been running several RedHat boxes (I think "boxen" sounds stupid :-) over the last couple years, with some Slackware before that, and I had been hearing some very good things about Debian, but I had also been hearing some bad things - mainly about dselect. I decided to wipe one of my RedHat boxes and try out Debian, so I ordered Slink from CheapBytes a few weeks ago.
After struggling with dselect (yes, it has really earned its reputation) for an hour, I finally got the system installed. I started playing around with it, and was having some problems - mainly that the programs which I was too lazy to download and had just copied from my roommate's RedHat 6 box just segfaulted on startup! I was getting very frustrated with this and was about to give up and reinstall RedHat 6 when I noticed that it was only using glibc 2.0.7, which RedHat 6 uses glibc 2.1. So I downloaded the debs of glibc 2.1 from the potato distribution, installed them, and all of a sudden everything worked perfectly.
Since then, I have never been happier with any distro I've ever tried. Debian is absolutely wonderful, especially since I don't have to deal with dselect anymore (a simple dpkg --install on a deb will install it, similar to using rpm) I would definately recommend it to anybody who has a decent amount of experience using Linux (or UNIX in general) and is less than satisfied with RedHat. But I didn't even know that I was less than satisfied until I tried something else. I highly recommend it, and am definately going to try out potato once it's stable (probably on my Alpha as well... it's running RedHat 5.1 right now and is in dire need of an upgrade)
"Software is like sex- the best is for free"
-Linus Torvalds
#2. This is open to discussion, although most people with an opinion on the subject say apt-get/dpkg eats rpm for lunch. Both have severe deficiencies, but to me dpkg has fewer of them.
For the equivalent solution with apt-get, you could make a directory on a server somewhere, run dpkg-scanpackages when you update something on that server (this creates the Packages file), and then have apt-get update; apt-get install packagename run every night from cron. That would update that package only.
Or, if you don't have any complicated dependancies requiring automatic installation ordering (it doesn't sound like that) you could replace the 'rpm -U *.rpm' in your cron script with 'dpkg -i *.deb' :)