Ugrading and NSLU2 to Wheezy
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Ugrading and NSLU2 to Wheezy

Jurjen Bokma

December 2012

Abstract

Succesful attempt to upgrade a LinkSys NSLU2 running Debian Lenny (through Squeeze) to Wheezy.

A friend has a LinkSys NSLU2, and it runs Debian. He wants it to run backups of his home server, but lacks the time to figure out how to do it right.

  1. I connect the disk, the network cable, and the power. Then I power up the Slug, but not the disk. After a bit of flickering from the leds on the front, the Ethernet led stays on, but the rest is off. And no activity on my network.

    Then I power up the disk, and there is some more flicker. Then the device asks my DHCP server for an IP number (and gets one).

    From this I conclude that the OS is on the external disk.

  2. There is an SSH server running on the Slug, but it doesn't let me in. My friend left no accounts, so I must assume I'm locked out. And I certainly have no root access.

    So I power the Slug down, and connect its external disk to my PC. I mount the root partition, edit my own account into /etc/passwd, /etc/shadow, /etc/group (just copy the relevant lines from another machine).

    Preparing for the upgrade, I also comment out all lines in etc/apt/sources.list, and create etc/apt/sources.list.d/squeeze.list and etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy (note: no extension on the latter) using the sources.list generator.

    For good measure, I also create etc/apt/apt.conf.d/80version containing: 

    APT::Default-Release "squeeze";

    Then I unmount, power down the disk, connect it to the Slug, and power up both disk and Slug. Now I can ssh into it, and I have root too. I create my homedir, had forgotten that.

  3. apprentice@slug:~$ apt-get update
    apprentice@slug:~$ apt-get dist-upgrade -dy
    apprentice@slug:~$ apt-get dist-upgrade

    This takes a while.

    Configuring sysv-rc fails:

    Unable to migrate to dependency-based boot system                                                                                                                 │ 
     │                                                                                                                                                                   │ 
     │ Tests have determined that problems in the boot system exist which prevent migration to dependency-based boot sequencing:                                         │ 
     │                                                                                                                                                                   │ 
     │ insserv: warning: script 'K05zleds' missing LSB tags and overrides, insserv: warning: script 'S01leds_startup' missing LSB tags and overrides, insserv: warning:  │ 
     │ script 'S99rmrecovery' missing LSB tags and overrides, insserv: warning: script 'S10nslu2-rtc' missing LSB tags and overrides, insserv: warning: script 'zleds'   │ 
     │ missing LSB tags and overrides, insserv: warning: script 'rmrecovery' missing LSB tags and overrides, insserv: warning: script 'nslu2-rtc' missing LSB tags and   │ 
     │ overrides, insserv: warning: script 'leds_startup' missing LSB tags and overrides, , package apache2.2-common removed but not purged, package exim4-base removed  │ 
     │ but not purged                                                                                                                                                    │ 
     │                                                                                                                                                                   │ 
     │ If the reported problem is a local modification, it needs to be fixed manually. If it's a bug in the package, it should be reported to the BTS and fixed in the   │ 
     │ package. See http://wiki.debian.org/LSBInitScripts/DependencyBasedBoot for more information about how to fix the problems preventing migration.                   │ 
     │                                                                                                                                                                   │ 
     │ To reattempt the migration process after the problems have been fixed, run "dpkg-reconfigure sysv-rc".

    For an always-on single-CPU system like the Slug, there isn't much gain in dependency-based boot anyway. So I leave things as they are.

    The process update-apt-xapian-index keeps running after upgrade, and brings the load to 4. I kill the process and remove the package. It shouldn't IMHO run on such modest hardware. I also do an apt-get autoremove.

  4. This is even more uneventful:

    apprentice@slug:~$ mv /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy /etc/apt/sources.list.d/wheezy.list
    apprentice@slug:~$ sed -i 's/squeeze/wheezy/' ../apt.conf.d/80version
    apprentice@slug:~$ apt-get update
    apprentice@slug:~$ apt-get dist-upgrade -dy
    apprentice@slug:~$ apt-get dist-upgrade

    But it does again take a long time. Reboot gets us a happy Wheezy.