Debian 8 “Jessie”
As most of you most likely already know, Debian Linux 8 aka “Jessie” has been released in the last few weeks.
This release brings us a host of significant updates: Xen 4.4, apache 2.4, php 5.6.x, postfix 2.11.x and perhaps most controversially a new parallel service start-up utilitiy called systemd
The Linux distribution vendor notice of the Debian 8 release is here. have a read if that interests you.
VRL Testing
We have been testing this release extensively on our test rigs, and, while we still have some tests to complete, the overall upgrade path looks relatively painless. The most significant change which requires an outage is the change to the “allow/deny” syntax in apache vhost stanzas and in the .htaccess file configurations.
These issues are well documented in this article from the Apache Software Foundation. It is well worth reading this article, as there are some traps here for the unwary.
Upgrade Plans
Our current plan is to upgrade and stabilise the hosts that require the least configuration changes to do so. These are likely to be, in the fist instance, the secondary MX and DNS servers and the database server. More details on this in our future posts
As always, our clients will be given advance notice of the planned outages.