October 15, 2018

Debian administration case history

I have inherited a Debian system that was installed back around 2015 and never updated. My goal is to bring it up to date and keep it so

What debian release am I running?

Debian releases receive 3 years of full support and 2 years of extra LTS (long term support). 
uname -a
Linux xxxhostxxx 3.16.0-4-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 3.16.7-ckt11-1+deb8u3 (2015-08-04) x86_64 GNU/Linux

lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:	Debian
Description:	Debian GNU/Linux 8.2 (jessie)
Release:	8.2
Codename:	jessie

cat /etc/os-release
PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 8 (jessie)"
NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
VERSION_ID="8"
VERSION="8 (jessie)"
ID=debian
HOME_URL="http://www.debian.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://www.debian.org/support/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/"
So, I am running "Jessie". Jessie was released on 4/26/2015. As of 2018 there is now "Stretch", released on 6/17/2017, this is Debian 9. Also, Debian 10 ("Buster") is available.

Upgrade Jessie

su
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
apt-get dist-upgrade
This seems to get us as far as is possible if we stay with Jessie and don't do any "backport" packages, which seem to need to be installed explicitly.
Comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org