Upgrading to Debian 10
I want to upgrade a linode from Debian 9 to Debian 10. On reading the section "Chapter 5. Issues to be aware of for buster" of the release notes I came across the following:
5.1.4. Daemons fail to start or system appears to hang during boot
https://www.debian.org/releases/stable/i386/release-notes/ch-information.en.html#entropy-starvation
Putting it briefly it says that on some virtual machines it may even take hours to boot after the upgrade because it will wait until it has enough entropy. I would like to know if this affects linode machines.
Thank you in advance.
3 Replies
Edit: Credit goes to dwfreed for his instructions on upgrading via IRC.
I didn't have a problem upgrading my systems, but issues could arise. My advise would be backup before you upgrade.
I ran sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade first to make sure everything was updated.
Then switched over the source list to buster in /etc/apt/sources.d
Ran sudo apt-update again
Lastly sudo aptitude dist-upgrade (install aptitude if you don't have it) Things went smoothly for me.
Yes low entropy can make your node's services start up more slowly. I haven't seen hours but 1-3 minute delays for sshd are also unpleasant.
An easy workaround is to install a package called haveged which uses a special algorithm to maintain a sufficient supply of entropy.
I've had this installed on my several Debian 10 servers for a month or two and it really works great.
Thanks a lot,
Everything went smoothly. I installed haveged before upgrading and did not notice any delays in the boot process.
As a side note to anyone upgrading to Debian 10, if you decide to go for new-style network interface names and edit /etc/network/interfaces be sure to disable auto-configure networking in your Linode settings.