Upgrading your Debian VPS from lenny to squeeze

Upgrading your Debian VPS from Lenny to Squeeze

Below are my notes recorded when migrating from Debian Lenny to Squeeze on my Bitfolk VPS, hopefully others will expand upon it with their own notes.

Background Work

• Optional: Move to UUIDs in /etc/fstab and /boot/grub/menu.list (kernel and kopt lines)
• Remove clocksource=jiffies from your kopt line if you have it in /boot/grub/menu.list
• Before you upgrade, check if your root partition is on /dev/xvda1, is so, make sure that 'fdisk -l /dev/xvda' works. If it doesn't you need to have your xvda1 device renamed to xvda. Contact support if that's the case.
• Check if you have xen.independent_wallclock in /etc/sysctl.conf, remove it if you do

Perform the upgrade

• If you use Debian Volatile, disable it and use the following instead:

 deb http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ squeeze-updates main non-free

• Follow the upgrade instructions at http://www.debian.org/releases/squeeze/i386/release-notes/ch-upgrading.en.html

Before rebooting

• Make sure you have grub-legacy installed
• Run update-grub to see which kernels it finds
• Make sure that your /boot/grub/menu.lst is actually going to boot into the right kernel