Debian 6 (squeeze) to 7 (wheezy) upgrade notes

Networking (firewall related)

Some of the older debian servers are firewalled using a command in the ”/etc/network/interfaces” file to load the iptables rules. For some reason this breaks the file on upgrade to Debian wheezy and the network interfaces don’t come up on boot. To fix, comment or remove the line:

pre-up iptables-restore < /etc/iptables.conf

and use the iptables-persistent package instead.

Also gives an error on

INPUT -i ! lo

Need to change to

INPUT ! -i lo

(To be fair, this has been deprecated for a while now)

Suhosin

php5-suhosin has been removed from wheezy. The upgrade sort of removes it, but it hangs around as a remove candidate package. Following http://pc-freak.net/blog/how-to-get-rid-of-php-warning-php-startup-unable-to-load-dynamic-library-usrlibphp520090626suhosin-so-on-debian-gnu-linux/ we check the package status with

dpkg -l | grep -i suhosin

and remove with

dpkg --purge php5-suhosin

This seems to fix the problem (don’t get emailed every so often by cron about it missing)

For next upgrade should remove it first.

Kernel

Make sure the generic kernel package is installed – have tended to choose the specific one in the past for no good reason.

apt-get install linux-image-amd64

This should ensure the 3.2 kernel is installed as part of the upgrade.

Published by

Jamie Scott

IT Administrator at the Institute for Gravitational Research, University of Glasgow