Last week I was mostly upgrading our main office server from Debian Woody to Sarge. It's been quite a struggle. I think most of the problems boil down either to our fairly complicated setup or to the archaic hardware we employ. Now that most things are working it looks like it'll be a huge improvement. The new Gnome desktop stuff makes things much more friendly, and I've been able to get rid of most of the unofficial Debian packages and backports we were using.
LTSP 4.1
I installed LTSP (the Linux Terminal Server Project) outside of Debian, with the installation tool they provide. It goes under /opt/ltsp, and all you need to do is point DHCP at it and make sure the right bits are available to the TFTP server (we use tftpd-hpa). I did this before the Sarge upgrade, and the newer version of X made an immediate impact. Since we now have up to date drivers we get accelerated graphics, and the mouse wheels work.
There is one problem: because LTSP 4.1 uses the Xorg server, and Debian is still using Xfree86, the XKB stuff is incompatible, so the nice Gnome 2.6 keyboard configuration stuff doesn't work. I'm not sure how to fix that yet. Hopefully Debian will soon switch to Xorg too, which would make the problem go away, otherwise I'll have to learn enough about XKB to plug them together.
Oh, if you use GNU Emacs, remember to turn on the mouse wheel option. Unless of course you want the default behaviour, which is to beep a lot when you scroll the wheel. I can imagine that some people might want to disable the wheel, but just what sort of user wants Emacs constantly beeping in their face?
Hylafax
There were several problems with upgrading Hylafax:
- Various files get moved from /var/spool/hylafax to /etc/hylafax during the upgrade. I think I needed to adjust a path somewhere, but I can't remember where. A recent change to the package has added a text file describing this change.
- Recent versions of Hylafax don't work with certain recent versions
of libtiff (specifically the one in the
libtiff3gpackage). I fixed that by downgrading it to the Woody version, but in the last week this has been fixed in the Debian package. - If you have
faxgettyrun frominitremember to prod it to get it restarted. I was running the old version for a couple of days before I noticed that one.
Request Tracker 2 on Sarge
For some reason Debian provides the packages request-tracker1 (in Woody) and request-tracker3 (in Sarge), but none for version 2. We use version 2 at GBdirect, and it would probably be a pain in the arse to upgrade to version 3, since we've got a lot of customizations.
I found an unofficial package for version 2 which seems to work. It seems to also be necessary to use the version of DBIx::SearchBuilder (libdbix-searchbuilder-perl) from Woody. This is version 0.48. The version in Sarge (version 1.01) causes some (but not all) of the ticket pages to get an error. Something to do with a join from a table to itself, as far as I could make out. It could be something in our customizations, but I didn't bother looking into it. (Update: it looks like version 1.10 of DBIx::SearchBuilder fixes this problem, but it's not in Debian yet.)
Samba
Version 3.0.6 of Samba uses the sendfile system call by
default to send files out onto the network. Unfortunately it's broken
in some kernel versions (apparently 2.4.20 or thereabouts). This
shows up as hangs on the Windows side, and as corrupted data coming
through. When I tried to copy a file across I got some random data at
the start and the end was chopped off.
To fix this, disable the sendfile system call with this
in the [global] bit of smb.conf:
use sendfile = no
I found aout about this in a mailing list thread.