Upgrade of i-doit Virtual Eval Appliance to Debian GNU/Linux 9 "Stretch"#
Besides the maintenance of i-doit you also have to keep the regular maintenance of the operating system in mind. This article explains the upgrade of Debian GNU/Linux in version 8 "Jessie" to version 9 "Stretch". It takes just a few steps and the i-doit Eval Virtual Appliance will be up to date.
Why should I upgrade?
Why should you upgrade your operating system to the latest version? There are good reasons for this:
- The IT documentation contains sensitiva data which need to be protected. This can only be guaranteed when all system compontents are up to date.
- The change from PHP 5.6 to 7.0 results in a measurable improvement in performance.
Requirements#
Before upgrading, you have to consider the following:
- The upgrade only describes the i-doit Virtual Eval Appliance in Version 1.2.x.
- We assume that no changes of the system were carried out (except updates). We are not responsible for subsequent changes.
- There has to be enough available memory. The update requires approximately 1 GByte free memory.
Tips#
You also should pay attention to the following issues before an upgrade:
- Do you have backups?
- You shoud inform i-doit users before downtime.
- Automatisms, cronjobs and external access should be stopped during the upgrade.
You can read many additional hints regarding the upgrade of the operating system provided by the Debian Community.
Preparing the Upgrade#
We connect via SSH and activate item 0 Launch Shell in the menu.
Then we carry out updates:
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Afterwards, the system needs to be rebooted. Because of an error the Linux kernel has to be up to date:
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After the restart, we connect again via SSH and activate the shell in the menu to ensure that version 8.8 is used:
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If this is not the case, the upgrade will fail.
As a precautionary measure you should stop the webserver so that i-doit is not activated in the meantime:
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Now everything is prepared for the upgrade.
Performing the Upgrade#
Now the sources for the distribution packages are adapted:
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The following line is supplemented at the end:
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All previous lines are commented out; a # is used as a prefix for each line.
Then all package sources are updated and a package upgrade is carried out:
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For the last command some user interactions are required:
- Answer the question Restart services during package upgrades without asking? with "Yes".
- Answer the question regarding the overwriting of Configuration file '/etc/issue' with N.
- Answer the question regarding the overwriting of Configuration file '/etc/issue.net' with N as well.
Now the actual upgrade of the packages to new versions is carried out:
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In order to activate the new Linux kernel the system is restarted:
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Thus the upgrade to version 9 is completed.
Follow-up#
After the restart we connect to the system again vai SSH and activate the shell in the menu.
Now we clear up the distribution packages:
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Then Apache Webserver and PHP have to be adapted as PHP 7.0 instead of PHP 5.6 is provided:
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Changes to the configuration files are not necessary.
Also the DBMS MariaDB has to be adapted:
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To guarantee the correct function of the welcome screen and the menu you have to modify some lines:
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The contents is replaced by the following:
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Also:
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Contents:
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And finally the version number of the appliance:
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Contents:
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Now also the follow-up works are completed. You can now restart all automatisms. The downtime is over and users can work with i-doit as usual.