Alex Selimov
669c977ed0
1.5 KiB
title: "The folly of Debian major version upgrades" date: 2025-07-13T20:35:50-05:00 topics: ['git', 'matrix', 'self-host']
I recently realized that my web server was still on Debian Buster, 2 whole major versions behind the latest Debian version. Normally this kind of thing wouldn't matter to me except that my matrix-synapse server was unable to federate with matrix synapse servers running newer versions. I normally run rolling release distributions on my local machines (I use Void btw) and it had been a long time since I tried this kind of upgrade. I went in hopeful that it would be straightforward.
This is a reminder to backup consistently.
Of course after thinking everything went fine, I tried to install a new package and libcrypt ends up getting removed leaving me unable to login to my server. Luckily I had backed up before this which saved all of my bespoke configurations. I'm sure no one noticed the down time but I did use this as an opportunity to make the followjng changes:
- matrix-synapse upgrade to dendrite for better performance.
- Gitea to forgejo just to try something different.
- Properly set up actions to auto build and deploy site on push.
- Rework website and swap to the terminal hugo theme
So far, I have positive opinions of all of my changes and highly recommend dendrite and forgejo.
Note to self: Never consider it upgrading Debian version. Always structure it as a migration to newer Debian version to avoid downtime