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homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9 ?

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debiman
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homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9 ?

#1 Post by debiman »

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Linux localhost 3.16.0-4-686-pae #1 SMP Debian 3.16.39-1+deb8u2 (2017-03-07) i686 GNU/Linux
this is an ~10y old hp laptop, which has been chugging away happily for more than a year, running debian 8, nginx, a flat-file CMS (php), and recently libresonic (requires tomcat server).
MySQL is currently installed, but nothing uses it iirc.
jessie-backports are in sources.list. what are they now? still jessie-backports?
ffmpeg is installed from backports.

my question is:
should i even do the dist-upgrade?
everything is working right now.
i am reading "oldstable" where i read "stable" earlier.

would it be harder to do the dist-upgrade later, if i get some problems?

i found two relevant threads:
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=132609
but my machine is already i686.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=133559
not much info there, and as i said i think i don't need mysql/mariadb anyway.

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dasein
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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#2 Post by dasein »

debiman wrote:jessie-backports are in sources.list. what are they now? still jessie-backports?
Yes.
debiman wrote:my question is:
should i even do the dist-upgrade?
It kinda sounds like you're hoping someone will give you "permission" to stay with Jessie. Consider it given.
debiman wrote:everything is working right now.
There's your answer. Thanks to the LTS folks, Jessie will still receive the most critical security updates.

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debiman
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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#3 Post by debiman »

being unsure of something is not the same as being unable to make a decision without the help of others, as you seem to be suggesting.

nevertheless, thanks for the input.

there is no need to change anything right now.

i hope i can still do the distupgrade later if the need arises?

or maybe i should turn my question around:
any foreseeable problems with this old hardware/server setup if i don't do the dist-upgrade now (but maybe later)?
Last edited by debiman on 2017-08-02 12:50, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#4 Post by Bulkley »

I have a laptop still running Wheezy. It is doing everything it is supposed to do and I can't think of any reason to change it. There are lots of us with good enough setups. This is especially true with servers; if it works don't fix it.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#5 Post by jmgibson1981 »

Bulkley wrote:I have a laptop still running Wheezy. It is doing everything it is supposed to do and I can't think of any reason to change it. There are lots of us with good enough setups. This is especially true with servers; if it works don't fix it.
This line of reasoning is why the world nearly imploded when Windows XP was dropped from support. You have to keep up with the changes. You cannot kick the can down the road. In the end it will cost more either in money or downtime and be a bigger headache.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#6 Post by Bulkley »

jmgibson1981 wrote:This line of reasoning is why the world nearly imploded when Windows XP was dropped from support. You have to keep up with the changes. You cannot kick the can down the road. In the end it will cost more either in money or downtime and be a bigger headache.
Whose world? Certainly not mine. Shiny new stuff rarely impresses me. I see no reason to keep up.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#7 Post by dasein »

jmgibson1981 wrote:This line of reasoning is why the world nearly imploded when Windows XP was dropped from support.
Uh, no. Whatever near-implosion there may have been had vastly more to do with the fact that the world's most widely deployed OS had a fundamentally FUBAR security posture.

"Alternative facts" not welcome here.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#8 Post by NFT5 »

Bulkley wrote:I have a laptop still running Wheezy. It is doing everything it is supposed to do and I can't think of any reason to change it
As do I. My home server still runs Wheezy too and that's not likely to change any time soon.
jmgibson1981 wrote:This line of reasoning is why the world nearly imploded when Windows XP was dropped from support. You have to keep up with the changes. You cannot kick the can down the road. In the end it will cost more either in money or downtime and be a bigger headache.
Hardly imploded. Most just kept right on using it. In fact, statistics report XP users as being 3.5 times more than the whole Linux world and I'd suggest that that number could be many times greater if small corporates and users in developing countries were accurately counted.

The question before us though, is should a server be upgraded from Wheezy to Jessie, or even Stretch. In that case the newer versions have little to offer for a server application. A new set of icons for Libre Office means absolutely nothing in this usage context. The other problem with your comparison to XP is that Wheezy has not reached 'end of life' and still gets security (and other) updates.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#9 Post by dasein »

NFT5 wrote:
Bulkley wrote:I have a laptop still running Wheezy...
As do I.
Me three. And I have no plans to replace it until Wheezy stops getting security updates.

Wheezy also runs my main desktop rig. And my mail server. And my HTPC.

I confess that partly it's sentiment. (Wheezy will be the last Debian I ever install.)

But ultimately, newer code just means shiny new bugs. Meh.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#10 Post by dilberts_left_nut »

Still have a squeeze server doing backups and file storage as it has since deployment, but not exposed to the world so no current plans to upgrade it.
It was also doing mail duties originally, but that was migrated to a wheezy (now jessie) server to keep up with security support (stretch upgrade to come soonish).
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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#11 Post by Lysander »

dasein wrote:(Wheezy will be the last Debian I ever install.)
Interesting. Care to elaborate on this?

As a side-note I do very much miss Jessie, but for no practical reason other than it's the Debian distro I started with. There is no functionality in Jessie which is absent from Stretch, save for minor, minor differences in GNOME.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#12 Post by ravenshining »

I wish I had read this thread before I updated!

KDE is completely different in Stretch, if you happened to be using the things KDE 5 didn't keep from 4. Settings don't carry over, most widgets are missing, they dropped their two most skeumorphic themes, messed up the previous default, and made the new default a flat design I personally can't stand.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#13 Post by debiman »

^ well that's kde.
not relevant to a command line server.

actually there was a logical error in the last sentence of my last post, i edited it now.

i have been thinking about this some more - my hardware is getting increasingly older (and i have no need to buy something new), but the operating systems are getting newer all the time - some in a respectably slow shuffle, some in short but hyperactive jumps.

i see there are strong reasons to keep things up-to-date, but what about old hardware support...
this is a rhethorical question, i realize now that debian combines the best here - fairly snappy security updates, with an otherwise very conservative policy. and conservative here can also mean: i want to keep on using (conserve) my old hardware. nice.

to compare:
i have the impression that my 2010 acer one netbook cannot keep up with archlinux anymore, even when i use the LTS kernel and an as-lightweight-as-possible X server setup.
maybe i should use oldstable on that...
and the very same will soon be true for my current machine, with a fairly recent mobo.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#14 Post by acewiza »

I'm way too busy to worry about fixing things that are not broken.
Nobody would ever ask questions If everyone possessed encyclopedic knowledge of the man pages.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#15 Post by dasein »

Lysander wrote:
dasein wrote:(Wheezy will be the last Debian I ever install.)
Interesting. Care to elaborate on this?
Philosophical differences
As a side-note I do very much miss Jessie, but for no practical reason other than it's the Debian distro I started with.
I think that's a common condition. My first glancing exposure to Debian was Lenny, via a long-dead respin called DreamLinux. (I was still too new to Linux to run pure Debian yet.)

The DreamLinux maintainers had phenomenal skills when it came to xfce theming... amazing eye-candy. To this day I've never seen anything like it. (It was meant to look OSX-like, but was far better, IMO.)

But I was equally impressed by its solidity, which was a function of the fact that it was based on then-Stable Lenny. I never had a single operational issue with it. Combine that level of aesthetics with the solidity of Debian Stable and you have one rockin' OS.

To this day, I occasionally wax nostalgic for DreamLinux, and by extension, Lenny.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#16 Post by Lysander »

I see - I will have to read this a few more times till I get the import of it. Since I have come to the party when systemd is already in place, I have had to go and read around exactly why people dislike it so much. Though, at the root of it, it's something that I don't see impacting me too much: if I were a developer I can see how it could cause immense vexation.
dasein wrote:I think that's a common condition.
It's good to know what there are others in the same boat. I can't justify downgrading for purely nostalgic reasons, and Stretch does a very good job. I imagine if I had held out with Linux more than I did in the 2000s I may have more comparisons to make, but my focus was largely on gaming back then so I jumped ship from Ubuntu and Fedora pretty soon after install.

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#17 Post by dasein »

Lysander wrote:I have had to go and read around exactly why people dislike it so much.
I can't speak for anyone else, but I've actually written mission-critical middleware in my life, in a venue where downtime cost approximately $1M (US) per day, which makes mine something of a unique perspective. Ironically enough, it was that very gig that taught me to revere and respect the Unix philosophy.

(Sorry for the mini hijack.)

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Re: homeserver on old laptop - should i dist-upgrade 8 => 9

#18 Post by lbuiyzxl »

If you use zram and very lack physical memory then you should do some benchmark on zram for yourself
Same benchmark on 3.16 Linux kernel consume "8388608" bytes of memory not "16777216"
zram on 3.16 no mm_stat you should see "/sys/block/zram<ID>/mem_used_total".
I'm sorry for my bad English skills
I'm don't want to be a nuisance.

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