[sf-lug] [www.]sf-lug.com up again, etc.: SF-LUG & BALUG: System OS upgrades

[Michael Paoli]

[include: "SF-LUG & BALUG: System OS upgrades" (less quotes) within
Subject: header for folks to follow on this topic]

[www.]sf-lug.com is up again, the VM guest has been converted from guest
under Xen to guest under qeum-kvm.  The sf-lug.com guest host is, in
most other regards, as it was before.  There are still the
updates/upgrades, etc. to do for the sf-lug.com VM guest, but now that
it's under qemu-kvm, and its host vicki has been upgraded/updated from
Debian GNU/Linux 5.0.9 i386 to Debian GNU Linux 6.0.4 amd64, work can
proceed on the sf-lug.com guest remotely, and at most any suitably
convenient time.  There's still some follow-on work to do on host vicki
(e.g. suitably merging in older vicki data, etc.), but no downtime is
presently anticipated as being needed for any of that.

The procedures took a bit longer than anticipated.  We ran into two
glitches that sucked up some extra time:
o a flakey Ethernet cable connection (replacing the cable took care of
   that).
o In the Debian installation, there was an option to go back and review
   disk configuration ... that didn't work very well at all, got quite
   stuck.  We terminated that portion of the install process, and tried
   several times to repeat it, but that didn't work - once it got stuck
   the first time, it continued to stick at same point when we tried to
   re-run through those steps.  We ended up restarting the install
   process, mostly repeating the earlier steps - 2nd time through (and
   without taking the option to go back and review disk configuration),
   installation proceeded smoothly.
o additionally, since things ran a bit late, I also ended up relocating
   before continuing to complete the work to convert and bring up the sflug VM
   - which delayed its completion a bit more.

references/excerpts:
http://www.wiki.balug.org/wiki/doku.php?id=system:vicki_debian_lenny_to_squeeze
[that URL won't be accessible until the balug VM is back up again -
after it's conversion from Xen to qemu-kvm).

$ hostname; date -Iseconds; uptime
sflug
2012-02-28T03:46:26-0800
  03:46:26 up 33 min,  2 users,  load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
$

$ hostname; date -Iseconds; uptime; cat /etc/debian_version; uname -a
vicki
2012-02-28T03:47:51-0800
  03:47:51 up  4:46,  2 users,  load average: 0.06, 0.02, 0.00
6.0.4
Linux vicki 2.6.32-5-amd64 #1 SMP Mon Jan 16 16:22:28 UTC 2012 x86_64  
GNU/Linux
$