2014-06-26 16:48:13 +00:00
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---
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layout: post
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title: "Citrix XenServer 5.5 vs. Debian 5.0 upgrade to 6.0"
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2016-02-26 15:26:26 +00:00
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date: 2011-05-27 17:33:41
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2014-06-26 16:48:13 +00:00
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tags: [citrix-xenserver, debian]
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permalink: /blog/2011/5/27/citrix-xenserver-vs-debian-5-0-upgrade-to-6-0
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published: true
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author:
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name: Gergely Polonkai
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email: gergely@polonkai.eu
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---
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Few weeks ago I’ve upgraded two of our Debian based application servers from
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5.0 to 6.0. Everything went fine, as the upgraded packages worked well with
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the 4.2 JBoss instances. For the new kernel we needed a reboot, but as the
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network had to be rebuilt, I postponed this reboot until the network changes.
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With the network, everything went fine again, we successfully migrated our
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mail servers behind a firewall. Also the Xen server (5.5.0, upgrade to 5.6
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still has to wait for a week or so) revolted well with some storage disks
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added. But the application servers remained silent…
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After checking the console, I realised that they don’t have an active console.
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And when I tried to manually start them, XenServer refused with a message
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regarding pygrub.
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To understand the problem, I had to understand how XenServer boots Debian. It
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reads the grub.conf on the first partition’s root or `/boot` directory, and
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starts the first option, without asking (correct me, if I’m mistaken
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somewhere). However, this pygrub thing can not parse the new, grub2 config.
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This is kinda frustrating.
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For the first step, I quickly installed a new Debian 5.0 system from my
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template. Then I attached the disks of the faulty virtual machine, and mounted
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all its partitions. This way I could reach my faulty 6.0 system with a chroot
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shell, from which I could install the `grub-legacy` package instead of grub,
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install the necessary kernel and XenServer tools (which were missing from both
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machines somehow), then halt the rescue system, and start up the original
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instance.
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Next week I will do an upgrade on the XenServer to 5.6.1. I hope no such
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problems will occur.
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