Best way to upgrade from Debian 7 to Debian 8/9
I've attempted an in-place upgrade from Debian 7 (Wheezy) to Debian 8 multiple times. Each time there have been errors in the middle of the upgrade. Wheezy is no longer supported and all of our repos are dead.
What is the best way to upgrade to Debian 8 from scratch without losing our server's IP address and so on?
2 Replies
I ended up just creating a new server from scratch since upgrading didn’t work. There’s an option in the Linode manager to transfer over your IP address from old Linode to the new one.
Hey there,
We're happy to help as we do not recommend inline distribution upgrades.
If you want to upgrade, we do recommend spinning up a new linode with your desired distribution and copying data over. Here are the basic steps to accomplish this:
- Create a new Linode with the new distribution
- Secure your server
- Rebuild your stack
- Transfer your data
- Swap IP addresses
Individual services (Apache, PHP, MySql) will need to be independently reinstalled on the new Linode. As long as the application versions aren’t too different, you should be able to simply copy over the configuration files and site data. Rsync is a really useful tool to help make that process easier.
We hope that helps. Please feel free to open a ticket if you encounter issues in the process of moving your data.
Sincerely,
Tara T
Linode Support Team