Lenny to Squeeze

There comes a time when you have to upgrade your Debian distribution to the new release. I was on Lenny, Squeeze had been out for a month.

To upgrade, all I had to do was to edit my apt source list – Please follow the full instructions Its always a worry. “Will it boot afterwards”? Its worst than having a baby.

Oh dear, halfway through it came up with a big error notification.

error: Unable to migrate to dependency based boot sequencing.
insserv: warning: script ‘****’ missing LSB tags and overrides
insserv: warning: script is corrupt or invalid: /etc/init.d/../rc*.d/*******

Unfortunately, I do not have my error message anymore but I will list a couple of things I needed to do to clear the message.

Basically, let the installation finish, its not a show-stopper. This new release of Debian enables dependency based booting but is not able to install that on your system. Your system should still boot the old way.

After the upgrade is complete, the command to try and reinstall the dependency boot is

dpkg-reconfigure sysv-rc

But first you need to fix the errors. When I do my next lenny to squeeze, I will do these first.

The first problem is that you may have lurking configuration files left behind after uninstalling packages. By default, apt leaves these behind just in case you reload the package.

aptitude search ‘~c’ (view them first)
aptitude purge ‘~c’

Another problem I encountered was S10vzquota scripts being invalid. Caveat – this fix applied to my machine – you may have a different setup.

First I did dpkg –get-selections which confirmed I did not have vzquota installed.

Then I did update-rc.d -f vzquota remove which removed the rogue scripts. Source for this tip I think there was one more vzquota script in the start up which I removed manually. After that, I was able to install dependency booting

Finally, was the wait which seemed like an eternity before I knew my system could boot up again.

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