May 14th, 2017
Now running Slackware 14.2!
Posted at
07:23:15 AM by
froems
After nearly a year of putting it off, I finally performed the upgrade.
It broke almost everything. First, it was still running the old Linux kernel when I rebooted, and LILO wasn't working. I soon realized that the server was a newer machine designed for Windows 10, and I had to use ELILO instead because it was compatible with the machine's Win10-compatible BIOS.
First reboot on the new kernel ended in a kernel panic because I was using the generic kernel. Fortunately, I had set ELILO to prompt to use the old kernel as a backup choice, used the old kernel after rebooting, then set up ELILO again to point to the huge new kernel image, and after the reboot the machine came up on the new kernel.
However, the USB enclosure wasn't working, it was throwing off the same errors as before. I had to uninstall the eudev packages completely and use the old version of udev (165), then cold-reboot after turning off the server and the USB enclosure for about ten minutes or so, and the new kernel was finally able to handshake to the ancient USB enclosure without all of those errors. Unfortunately, it had been over two years since the server had been rebooted with that enclosure, so it had to run a two-hour file system check.
So then, everything is up and running, right? Wrong. The Perl upgrade broke all of the old Perl packages, and I couldn't even connect to CPAN without having a memory fault. I had to wipe all of the old Perl packages and reinstall them all from scratch starting with CPAN.
Then I recompiled the web server with Apache httpd 2.4.25 (finally running 2.4 after all these years!), mod_perl 2.0.10, and php 5.6.30 (skipping the 5.5 releases entirely), and it all went surprisingly smooth. Just a few minor updates to httpd.conf were in order.
The last thing to fix were a few sudo scripts that had broken. Investigation showed that sudo no longer inherited environment variables unless you run visudo to explicitly allow that. So I did.
And now, we're up and running on Slackware 14.2, and I still have one day left this weekend!