Upgrading your VPS from Debian 5 to Debian 6

Posted on June 7, 2011 by richard

Recently there’s been released an upgraded version of the popular Debian GNU/Linux distribution, from Debian version 5 to version 6, otherwise known of Debian “Lenny” to “Squeeze”.

The following is a step-by-step guide for Network Presence customers on upgrading their Debian 5 aka “Lenny” VPS to Debian 6 (Squeeze). Please contact us if you have any problems performing this upgrade or if you’d like us to do it for you, which we’re most happy to do.

Step 1: Backup your VPS. Ask us to do so for you if you’d like.

Step 2: Update your /etc/apt/sources.list file and change any word “lenny” to “squeeze”.
After that, your sources.list file may look something like:
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian squeeze main non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main non-free

If anything lists “stable”, that’s ok, as the Debian ‘stable’ repo is now Squeeze/Deb 6 anyway.

Step 3: Run apt-get update after the above sources.list change.

Step 4: Run apt-get install apt dpkg as this gets the Squeeze versions of the Packaging s/ware installed, which we use next.

Step 5: Run apt-get install grub-legacy

Step 6: Run “rm -f /etc/kernel/postinst.d/zz-update-grub” as that file is no longer req’d in this VPS context.

Step 7: Run apt-get dist-upgrade – this performs the upgrade of all currently install Debian packages and can take some time to complete, with various prompts, one of which is noted below.

Note: During the install of the “grub-pc” package, do not select/check the box which selects your VPS’ disk drive (/dev/sda1 at a “GRUB install devices”) and allow install/upgrades to continue without installing GRUB.

Note: The grub-pc install may error, which is fine & you can select to continue the upgrade process within installing grub-pc.

Note: Do allow the dist-upgrade process to update your /etc/fstab file.

Step 8: Re-run apt-get install grub-legacy

Step 9: Check that your /boot/grub/menu.lst file does refer to the new kernel version. ie: Kernel 2.6.32-5-xen is Squeeze’ kernel.

eg:
default=0
timeout=20

title Debian Squeeze, kernel 2.6.32-5-xen
root (hd0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.32-5-xen console=hvc0 root=/dev/xvda1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.32-5-xen

title OLD Debian Lenny, kernel 2.6.26-2-xen
root (hd0)
kernel /boot/vmlinuz-2.6.26-2-xen console=hvc0 root=/dev/sda1 ro
initrd /boot/initrd.img-2.6.26-2-xen

Step 10: Contact us, as we need to change a setting for your VPS startup procedure to reflect the change in Debian’s ‘virtual disk’ names from Debian 5 to 6.

Step 11: Reboot to run up the Squeeze kernel. Please contact us if you have any problems, as we’re most happy to help.

FYI,
Richard.

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Welcome to World IPv6 Day, but…

Posted on June 7, 2011 by richard

Welcome to World IPv6 Day, but we’ve been here a very long time! http://netpr.es/freeipv6vps1 http://netpr.es/ipv6vps2 http://is.gd/DstbFh

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“EcoPOD packs the equivalent o…

Posted on June 7, 2011 by richard

“EcoPOD packs the equivalent of a 10,000 square foot data center into a compact, serviceable package in 1/10 the space” http://is.gd/Gd75Yt

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Installing Squirrelmail to CentOS

Posted on June 5, 2011 by richard

Squirrelmail is a simple PHP based Webmail capability that’s very easy to install on CentOS Linux.

Installing Squirrelmail is as easy as running the following command as root on your CentOS system:

yum -y install squirrelmail

Because Squirrelmail is included in the Base distro of CentOS!

I usually install it along with the Sendmail Mail Server software, so I also do:

yum -y install sendmail

If the pre-requisites for the squirrelmail package doesn’t install sendmail anyway.

You’ll probably want to use IMAP via localhost for Squirrelmail to interact with your Mail & mailboxes, so also install Dovecot, via:

yum -y install dovecot

Then configure Dovecot by setting the ‘protocols =’ & ssl file lines in /etc/dovecot.conf to be:

protocols = imap imaps
ssl_cert_file = /etc/pki/dovecot/certs/dovecot.pem
ssl_key_file = /etc/pki/dovecot/private/dovecot.pem

Then save that update & restart Dovecot with service dovecot restart as the install of Dovecot created those SSL Cert & Key files.

Best to restart your Apache webserver too after this, so do service httpd restart and make sure the site(s) are running ok.

Configure Squirrelmail itself by running the command /usr/share/squirrelmail/config/conf.pl as root (is best) and I suggest setting you own Organisation fields (press ‘1’ & then the number for each setting you’d like to change, all in a text-based window/’ncurses’ UI from a login shell on your CentOS host). Use the ‘s’ command to save your config updates, then ‘Q’ to exit the configurer.
Pretty much all the other default settings of Squirrelmail are ok in CentOS & you may need to make the conf.pl file executable with chmod a+x /usr/share/squirrelmail/config/conf.pl

In a browser, go to ‘http://your-site-name.url/webmail’ to get to Squirrelmail and try to login with the username & password of a Linux user on your CentOS host, if you are successful in logging in, create some emails & send them off, get replies, etc.
If the login failed, check the web server log files in /var/log/httpd/

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Weekly Tweets for 2011-06-05

Posted on June 5, 2011 by richard

Powered by Twitter Tools

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Tweets for 2011-06-04

Posted on June 4, 2011 by richard

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Get 20%+ more RAM on our Canberra VPS Hosting

Posted on June 3, 2011 by richard

For the next few weeks we’re deploying customer VPS in Canberra, on our new Canbarran hardware, which includes fast RAID6 disk arrays, as well as lots of fast RAM & CPU, meaning that Canberra is our “high end computing” POP.

So until Jan 2012, our offer is to increase the amount of RAM that your VPS Order gets by 20% and host that VPS in Canberra, on this new fast hardware.

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Sydney Full, but Canberran VPS Screamers online!

Posted on June 3, 2011 by richard

We’ve filled our Sydney VPS Hosting resources after a month of solid orders, which is fantastic for Network Presence & we’ve overflowed into our new Canberran POP to keep provisioning “Big Data” VPS connected to Australia’s best networks.

Canberra is a ‘firecracker’ of a POP, with two 30TB RAID6 arrays online and pushed to the Internet via our dedicated Cbr-Syd Link!

The disk & processing available online in Canberra will continue growing during 2011 and into 2012, so this POP can carry your bulk/high-volume Internet storage (“Big Data”) forward from excellent Australian and Asian connectivity.

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All Network Presence #VPS Plan…

Posted on June 3, 2011 by richard

All Network Presence #VPS Plans & services include native & full Internet #IPv6 routing & connectivity! http://netpr.es/ipv6vps2 #NetPres

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Using parted on > 2TB drives to create new partitions for LVM

Posted on June 3, 2011 by richard

On your Linux based hardware with “large” disks (>> 2TB drives to Linux) you may want to use the GNU ‘parted’ disk partition utility to create storage that’s available to the kernel & LVM.

As root run ‘parted /dev/sdX’ where X is the SAS/SATA/whatever controller’s drive as presented to the Linux kernel.

At the ‘(parted)’ prompt, enter:

mkpart primary ext3 0 -1
set 1 lvm on

Then ‘quit’ Parted to save your changes to the partition table on the relevant drive.

This creates a new partition assigned the whole drive capacity and gives it the LVM partition type, then saves those changes & exits parted.

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