After installing a clean Debian Lenny Xen system using xen-tools, I received this strange error when trying to connect using ssh to the machine:
PTY allocation request failed on channel 0
stdin: is not a tty

It looks like for some reason, xen-tools didn’t install the udev package. So in order to fix this issue, I had to connect (using the virtual console) to the xen machine:
xen console 1
and install udev:
apt-get install udev
strange enough the /dev/pts mount entry was present in /etc/fstab so all I had to do was to remount it with:
mount -a
(if you don’t have this entry make sure to add it in /etc/fstab:
devpts /dev/pts devpts rw,noexec,nosuid,gid=5,mode=620 0 0
and if the folder /dev/pts doesn’t exist create it first and after that mount -a).

This should fix the ssh problem and you should now be able to ssh into the xen machine. Next to see if this is fixed in xen-tools in Squeeze, and if not to file a bug for it.

This post will show how to upgrade from Debian 5.0.x “Lenny” to the latest stable Debian release 6.0 “Squeeze”. One of the reasons I’ve liked Debian in the first place was the advantage of being able to do a live, in place updates from one major release to another, usually in a safe way. As always, if you do this, please take some time to backup your system if you care of your data, as this is a major upgrade and things can go wrong. Squeeze brings in a few big changes and I will outline some of them, but I would recommend to read the release notes and look for any incompatibilities (hardware or software) or changed things that could affect your particular setup.

1. Update apt sources.list

The first thing we will do (after the backup of course) is to edit the /etc/apt/sources.list file and replace “lenny” with “squeeze“. Originally, this might look like this (for a system using the main US mirrors; your file might use a different local one):

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ lenny main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ etch/updates lenny contrib non-free

after replacing lenny with squeeze the file will look like this:

deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/ squeeze main contrib non-free

deb http://security.debian.org/ squeeze/updates main contrib non-free

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Updated Debian GNU/Linux: 5.0.6 release

This week the Debian project released the 6th update to its stable release Lenny, 5.0.6. All recent security updates have been added, as well as some other fixes. The linux-2.6 package was also updated for increased hardware support.

Backports service is now official

I was very happy to hear that the debian backports project is now an official debian project. I always used (and liked) the backports.org repository to easily bring in updated software to the stable release. Now, after it become an official project and not just a fun project of three developers will hopefully be even better and have more software added into backports much faster. Don’t forget to change your apt sources config to point to backports.debian.org (old backports.org mirror will still work for a while).
deb http://backports.debian.org/debian-backports lenny-backports main contrib non-free

Debian growth over time

Also on some unrelated news Romain Francoise published some interesting stats on the growth of the Debian archive over time:

• woody (2002): 8273 packages
• sarge (2005): 15195 packages (+83.7%)
• etch (2007): 18043 packages (+18.7%)
• lenny (2009): 22277 packages (+23.5%)
• squeeze (2010?): 28870 packages (+29.6%)

Wow… now that is really impressive.

The Debian project just announced the fifth update for its stable distribution “lenny” 5.0.5. Those installing regular updates from security.debian.org will notice just a few new updates (base-files for the version change to 5.0.5, apache2, apt, bind9, linux-image, openssl, etc). Also the installer has been updated in this point release to correct an issue with the display of the “BIOS boot area” partitioner option when using GPT partitions and to update the list of available mirror servers for package installation.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to- date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

New CD and DVD images containing updated packages and the regular installation media accompanied with the package archive respectively will be available soon at the regular locations.”

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2010/20100626

The Debian project just announced the third update for its stable distribution “lenny” 5.0.3. Those installing regular updates from security.debian.org will notice just a few new updates (base-files for the version change to 5.0.3, heartbeat, perl, openssl, linux-image, svn, etc). Also the installer has been updated to incorporate the new kernels released with this point release, adding support for new network hardware, and to fix a segfault early in the boot process of installations for the S/390 architecture.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the third update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.

New CD and DVD images containing updated packages and the regular installation media accompanied with the package archive respectively will be available soon at the regular locations.”

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090905

The Debian project just announced the second update for its stable distribution “lenny” 5.0.2. Those installing regular updates from security.debian.org might not even notice this update, except for the version change to 5.0.2. As an interesting change, the debian-installer has been updated to allow the installation of the oldstable release (Debian 4.0 “etch”).

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the second update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename “lenny”). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.
Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to- date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.
…
New version of the debian-installer
The debian-installer has been updated to allow the installation of the previous stable release (Debian 4.0 “etch”) and to include an updated cdebconf package which resolves several issues with installation menu rendering using the newt frontend, including:
* explanatory text overlapping with the input box due to a height miscalculation
* overlapping of the “Go Back” button and the select list on certain screens
* suboptimal screen usage, particularly affecting debian-edu installations
The installer has been rebuilt to use the updated kernel packages included in this point release, resolving issues with installation on s390 G5 systems and IBM summit-based i386 systems.”

Release Announcement: http://www.debian.org/News/2009/20090627

My post “Debian Lenny PXE Installation on Dell PowerEdge 1950/2950 servers: bnx2 annoyances” got some attention and several people used the resulted initrd images. My intention with that post was to show anyone how they can easily build their own updated initrd and use it to successfully install Dell PE 1950/2950 (or other systems that have bnx2 based nic’s). Apparently several people used the images I’ve made available for download and when lenny was updated to 5.0.1 the images stopped working because of the kernel upgrade in the installer. Several people send me notices that this is no longer working and I promptly build updated images for i386 and amd64. I would like to thank to all the people to contact me about this and specially to Alexander Grümmer that showed me that my previous post was not clear enough with the commands needed to rebuild your own initrd. This post will show a full copy and paste type of commands for doing this. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a few days after the eighth update of etch (4.0r8), the Debian project announced the first update of lenny. Opposed to the etch updates, this receives a minor numbering in the version 5.0.1 and also updates the /etc/debian_version file with this information; even if this is a simple change, I like it a lot as it will make it much easier to identify what update level a machine is running (just like redhat world had forever in /etc/redhat-release ). Besides this cosmetic change, most of the updates were already on security.debian.org; still there is a kernel update (minor version update of course) that fixes some openvz, nfs bugs (see debian kernel changelog for full details) and because of this also an updated debian-installer.

“The Debian project is pleased to announce the first update of its stable distribution Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 (codename lenny). This update mainly adds corrections for security problems to the stable release, along with a few adjustment to serious problems.

Please note that this update does not constitute a new version of Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 but only updates some of the packages included. There is no need to throw away 5.0 CDs or DVDs but only to update via an up-to-date Debian mirror after an installation, to cause any out of date packages to be updated.

Those who frequently install updates from security.debian.org won’t have to update many packages and most updates from security.debian.org are included in this update.”

Release Announcement: http://debian.org/News/2009/20090411

Even though at some point it looked like debian lenny will not have full xen support (for the 2.6.26 amd64 kernel) in the end this was fixed and lenny supports fully Xen ever on amd64. Upgrading from 2.6.18 to 2.6.26 is very straightforward (though we were using xen-hypervisor 3.2-1 already) and the only problem noticed was that the console on the domU machines was no longer working: it was showing the output correctly, but you could not enter anything on the console.

This is caused by the ‘new Xen console’ (xen now uses hvc0 for its console) and to fix it you have to add to your virtual machine xen configuration file one line: extra = “console=hvc0 xencons=tty”, restart the vm and it should be fine. In /etc/xen/<myvm>.cfg add this line:
extra = "console=hvc0 xencons=tty"

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Debian Lenny installer brings in several improvements over the old stable Etch version, but for us this has been a big disappointment. Basically as I mentioned in an older post “bnx2 missing from stock Debian 2.6.24 etchnhalf kernel“, starting with kernel 2.6.24, the debian team removed the bnx2 kernel module out of the kernel due to license restrictions placed on the firmware. I am a long time debian fan and I can fully understand the reason why they have done that, but still, if you have several hundred servers that use the Broadcom NetXtreme II NIC (that uses the bnx2 module) then you have a problem. This post is intended to show how we solved this problem and hopefully help others in the same situation.

As I mentioned we have many Dell PE1950 and PE2950 servers and we deploy all new servers using PXE boot install and use preseeding to setup basic configurations (custom partitions, apt mirrors, etc.). This worked fine for some years now with debian Etch; let’s see what happens with lenny installer: after the initial pxe boot, the installation halts with this error:
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