Is Upgrading Debian not supported?

[warg]

Hello,

I just upgraded my test server of DirectAdmin from Debian 10 to 11 and afterwards CustomBuild was broken. Then I rebuilded PHP and CustomBuild works again. Now I can update Exim and got some hint/information from CustomBuild about Exim:



So my general question: Is it not supported to do a apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade to upgrade from Debian 10 to 11 and if not, how to upgrade without breaking DirectAdmin or CustomBuild? It looks like the OS upgrade installed older versions of PHP and Exim than CustomBuild delivers.

Best Regards,

 

[Richard G]

It looks like the OS upgrade installed older versions of PHP and Exim than CustomBuild delivers.

I don't work with Debian, but what I do know is that you should not have any OS installing (or upgrading) PHP and/or Exim because that is handled by custombuild en some things are compiled from source.

So if you updated your Debian and it upgraded PHP and Exim too (to an older version) then something might have gone wrong. That's the good thing of yum systems, you can exclude things from being touched by the OS. Hopefully apt has a kindlike function.

I think the best thing you could do after a Debian major upgrade from 10 to 11 is logging in via SSH, go the the custombuild directory and do a:
./build update ./build all d
which rebuilds all things without touching the current configs. But at least everything is correctly in place.

Maybe some Debian user can confirm this. Maybe my friend @bdacus01 can shed a light on this?

 

[warg]

Hi @Richard G!

Yep, rebuilding everything might be a good idea. I'm not sure how DirectAdmin does it so I would expect that apt-get detects that the current packages (by Directadmin) are newer and thus shouldn't be updated. I didn't check what exactly the system upgrade did update and cleared the terminal already. So far everything went fine and I checked DirectAdmin for working properly and I found no issue beside that I just realized that CustomBuild threw some http error code 502 error and was not working properly but that was fixed by rebuilding PHP and then I just updated exim again.

Of course you can exclude packages from apt-get upgrade/dist-upgrade progress but I'm not sure it would have helped here. I will try to watch out for next time to see if this issue occurs with other OS upgrades too.

Thank you for your prompt reply!

Best Regards,

 

[Richard G]

so I would expect that apt-get detects that the current packages (by Directadmin) are newer and thus shouldn't be updated.

Right.
As for my prompt reply you're welcome. For the rest I hope Brent will pass by because as far as I know he has done and tested this before, so he might also know how to exclude certain things from an OS update using apt-get.

 

[factor]

What you have to remember is DA is maintained and updates by a mostly Sources driven process. Most applications are compiled not a precompiled binary.

Depends on what you mean by supported. Would DA tell you to do it maybe maybe not. In general I have upgraded from 9 > 10 > 11 with no issues on the Debian front.

On the DA side you need to recompile like @Richard G said.

cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
./build set_fastest
./build clean
./build update
./build all
./build rewrite_confs

Should work just fine.


As far as excluding things I just did one of boxes and all was fine. If you have some 3rd party stuff outside the standard install you might need to do some research on that.

Take a Snapshot before doing it.
Change license at Directadmin.com
Change sources.list

sed -i 's/buster/bullseye/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

double check this here https://wiki.debian.org/SourcesList#Distribution

apt update
apt upgrade
apt dist-upgrade
apt autoremove

re run preinstall commands

apt-get install gcc g++ make flex bison openssl libssl-dev perl perl-base perl-modules-5.32 libperl-dev libperl4-corelibs-perl libwww-perl libaio1 libaio-dev \
zlib1g zlib1g-dev libcap-dev cron bzip2 zip automake autoconf libtool cmake pkg-config python libdb-dev libsasl2-dev \
libncurses5 libncurses5-dev libsystemd-dev bind9 dnsutils quota patch logrotate rsyslog libc6-dev libexpat1-dev \
libcrypt-openssl-rsa-perl libnuma-dev libnuma1

cd /usr/local/directadmin/custombuild
./build set_fastest
./build clean
./build update
./build all
./build rewrite_confs

if all goes well
reboot

Hope that helps. Hope you are well too..

 

[k1l0b1t]

Sometimes i wished da had an option for pre compiled binaries though, being full apt or smt could make things simpler sometimes