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Citrix XenServer 5.5 vs. Debian 5.0 upgrade to 6.0
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:date: 2011-05-27T17:33:41Z
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:category: blog
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:tags: citrix-xenserver,debian
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:url: blog/2011/5/27/citrix-xenserver-vs-debian-5-0-upgrade-to-6-0.html
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:save_as: blog/2011/5/27/citrix-xenserver-vs-debian-5-0-upgrade-to-6-0.html
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:status: published
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:author: Gergely Polonkai
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Few weeks ago I’ve upgraded two of our Debian based application servers from 5.0 to 6.0.
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Everything went fine, as the upgraded packages worked well with the 4.2 JBoss instances. For the
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new kernel we needed a reboot, but as the network had to be rebuilt, I postponed this reboot until
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the network changes. 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 still has to wait for
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a week or so) revolted well with some storage disks added. But the application servers remained
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silent…
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After checking the console, I realised that they don’t have an active console. And when I tried
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to manually start them, XenServer refused with a message regarding ``pygrub``.
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To understand the problem, I had to understand how XenServer boots Debian. It reads the
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``grub.conf`` on the first partition’s root or ``/boot`` directory, and starts the first option,
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without asking (correct me, if I’m mistaken somewhere). However, this ``pygrub`` thing can not
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parse the new, grub2 config. This is kinda frustrating.
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For the first step, I quickly installed a new Debian 5.0 system from my template. Then I attached
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the disks of the faulty virtual machine, and mounted all its partitions. This way I could reach
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my faulty 6.0 system with a chroot shell, from which I could install the ``grub-legacy`` package
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instead of grub, 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 instance.
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Next week I will do an upgrade on the XenServer to 5.6.1. I hope no such problems will occur.
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