[ILUG] Debian 3.0 upgrade problems

[Glen Gray]

Hey Guys,

I'm having some strange issues upgrading an old Debian 3.0 mail server.

I've taken a snapshot of the servers filesystem and made a booting  
Xen VM on a new server platform. I plan on upgrading this server  
incrementally from 3.0 through 3.1 to 4.0.

 From what I've read, updating from 3.0 to 3.1 should be as simple as  
point my apt source to sarge and running
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade

However, this dies, seems that coreutils gets installed before the  
libc6 upgrade, so that some files like /usr/bin/touch won't run  
anymore as they are looking for GLIBC 2.3 and we're still running the  
2.2 version. This breaks various pre/post scripts in the .debs.

If I upgrade libc6 first and then do the update/dist-upgrade Things  
seem to progress okay for a while. Then packages seem to stop  
extracting. I can get things moving again with a dpkg --configure -a  
followed by an apt-get -f install and then do the dist-upgrade again.

Eventually everything updated with no outstanding issues, but I was  
no longer able to login. It seems that the libpam-modules upgraded  
incorrectly and didn't install all the pam_<blah>.so files in /lib/ 
security.  I can do an apt-get --reinstall on the deb but I'm  
concerned about any other issues that might go unnoticed 'til it's  
too late. What I found interesting was that dpkg -l on libpam-modules  
didn't show any of the /lib/security/*.so files at all. Should it  
have, or does it only show what it know's it's installed (not what  
it's supposed to have installed)

Cheers,
--
Glen Gray <glen at lincor.com>              Digital Depot, Thomas Street
Senior Software Engineer                            Dublin 8, Ireland
Lincor Solutions Ltd.                          Ph: +353 (0) 1 4893682