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Today is Debian 8 release day

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Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#131

Post by the_why_of_y »

justincormack wrote: post #26
xyby wrote: post #9

I have some legacy linux servers that need an update to a new OS. Is Debian 8 a good choice? All I care about is that stuff just works for as many years as possible, gets security updates and does not break.

Debian 8 has support until 2017. Ubuntu 1404 LTS has support until 2019. RHEL 7 has support until 2024 (and Centos).

Please be aware that with Ubuntu LTS, only the small number of packages in "main" gets support for the full LTS time-frame, while the majority of packages in "universe" gets no official support after the 18 months (?) of a regular release time-frame.

So in practice you don't get a larger number of supported packages than with RHEL/CentOS.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#132

Post by vbernat »

mrmondo wrote: post #126

As a long time Debian user in a professional environment I was really excited to see that Debian 8 finally added proper SELinux policies - however my colleagues and I were very disappointed to see that these (although working without noticeable issue) were dropped at the last minute with no explanation. Several people in the community have asked what happened to the packages but had no reply from the Debian mailing l…

It's unfortunate that you didn't get an answer from your posts in the mailing list but the package has been dropped because of those "grave/serious" bugs:

* https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=771484 * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756729

The main problem seems to be there is not enough manpower to keep those policies up-to-date. Once there are "grave/serious" bugs, a non-essential package is usually dropped from testing (hence from the next stable). If people care enough, this is usually a hint to fix those bugs.

If you want to help, you can help fixing thos bugs: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=refpolicy

Once the bugs are fixed, the package can be backported to Jessie.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#133

Post by the_why_of_y »

progman wrote: post #100
geoka9 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any idea how long Debian wheezy will continue to receive security bug fixes?

At least long enough to decide which Linux distro to use in the future. Unfortunately many distros have already jumped on the systemd wagon but I think soon there will be a increasing collection of non-systemd alternatives which will continue to follow the KISS principle which made Unix and Linux so great. There already _are_ alternatives to systemd and systemv -- launchd and upstart (used by ChromeOS) for instance.…

There may be alternatives to systemd, but ... launchd?

Do you really want to write your job descriptions in the amazingly silly XML p-list schema?

Upstart's event model doesn't even work properly.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/447654

And... did you know it's using ptrace(2) to track processes?

https://bugs.launchpad.net/upstart/+bug/406397

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#134

Post by the_why_of_y »

tzakrajs wrote: post #110
walterbell wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Has there been a significant loss of Debian senior development resources to the https://devuan.org fork, as a result of the systemd debates?

Russ Allbery left https://lwn.net/Articles/620879/ edit: I don't know if he is going Devuan, but is related.

It was very sad to see Russ Allbery leave the Debian Technical Committee; his deeply insightful and remarkably well written discussions will be missed.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#136

Post by mrmondo »

vbernat wrote: post #132
mrmondo wrote: post #126

As a long time Debian user in a professional environment I was really excited to see that Debian 8 finally added proper SELinux policies - however my colleagues and I were very disappointed to see that these (although working without noticeable issue) were dropped at the last minute with no explanation. Several people in the community have asked what happened to the packages but had no reply from the Debian mailing l…

It's unfortunate that you didn't get an answer from your posts in the mailing list but the package has been dropped because of those "grave/serious" bugs: * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=771484 * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756729 The main problem seems to be there is not enough manpower to keep those policies up-to-date. Once there are "grave/serious" bugs, a non-essential p…

That's interesting indeed - I just don't see how a modern security conscious distribution can be considered releasable without SELinux working.

We were using them just fine in a pre-prod (waiting for Jessie to be released) environment. We weren't using GPG but experienced no other issues.

Right now, to get around the problem we have ported Fedora's policies across. I'm unsure if these two bugs exist when using Fedora's policies but I'd say they would be.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#137

Post by chousuke »

Silhouette wrote: post #83
chousuke wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I understanding this correctly: instead of having the boot partitions configured as a (MD?) RAID set, you had somehow manually cloned them between two disks? A mirrored boot partition works just fine if you're legacy booting... With EFI I guess you have to do manual cloning (which is fragile) or rely on hardware RAID. Did you use some tool to do that? How do you expect the upgrade process to even be able to take t…

Did you use some tool to do that? I've long forgotten exactly why these systems were first set up that way. Presumably it was because at the time someone was leaving their options open about the RAID set-up for the main drives/partitions and bootloaders of that generation didn't support MD well so keeping boot as a non-RAID set-up was not uncommon. Whatever the history, the fact is that before the automated part of t…

Hmm, this sounds like a difference in expectations. I don't think anyone said that Debian upgrades are fully automated; the package manager does what it can (and it usually does a good job) but it's always the sysadmin's job to verify that the configuration at reboot is sane, especially if there's even a hint of something special in the configuration.

Upgrade scripts certainly could try to predict every crazy thing people do with their computers, but past a certain point, it's not very productive. People are creative.

In the end, the admin must make the decision whether reinstalling and reconfiguring a server has a lower general cost than verifying and potentially fixing an upgraded installation.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#138

Post by vbernat »

mrmondo wrote: post #136
vbernat wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's unfortunate that you didn't get an answer from your posts in the mailing list but the package has been dropped because of those "grave/serious" bugs: * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=771484 * https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=756729 The main problem seems to be there is not enough manpower to keep those policies up-to-date. Once there are "grave/serious" bugs, a non-essential p…

That's interesting indeed - I just don't see how a modern security conscious distribution can be considered releasable without SELinux working. We were using them just fine in a pre-prod (waiting for Jessie to be released) environment. We weren't using GPG but experienced no other issues. Right now, to get around the problem we have ported Fedora's policies across. I'm unsure if these two bugs exist when using Fedora…

SELinux is not a release goal. It's possible to advocate for new release goals (for example, it is likely that reproducible build will be a release goal for the next release) but this means that some people have to volunteer to do the work.

I don't know enough SELinux to comment on the technical details.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#139

Post by Silhouette »

chousuke wrote: post #137
Silhouette wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you use some tool to do that? I've long forgotten exactly why these systems were first set up that way. Presumably it was because at the time someone was leaving their options open about the RAID set-up for the main drives/partitions and bootloaders of that generation didn't support MD well so keeping boot as a non-RAID set-up was not uncommon. Whatever the history, the fact is that before the automated part of t…

Hmm, this sounds like a difference in expectations. I don't think anyone said that Debian upgrades are fully automated; the package manager does what it can (and it usually does a good job) but it's always the sysadmin's job to verify that the configuration at reboot is sane, especially if there's even a hint of something special in the configuration. Upgrade scripts certainly could try to predict every crazy thing p…

Of course in the end it's the sysadmin's job to administer the system, but that's also a convenient way to shift responsibility for problems away from the tools. As I mentioned, the problems were quickly detected and subsequently fixed in the cases I'm aware of. But that still required time and effort, and since realistically no sysadmin is going to be an expert on every part of their system that might be affected by an OS upgrade on this scale, I still think it's fair to highlight the risk.

Re: Today is Debian 8 release day

#140

Post by Shish2k »

stephenr wrote: post #124
Shish2k wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upgrade from wheezy. Continue using sysvinit because "continue using what's installed already" trumps "systemd is default for fresh installs". Problem doesn't even exist. (I actually like systemd, just adding to the list of ways that Debian makes it easy to avoid it, in the hope of the whiners whining less :P)

The docs indicate sysvinit will be replaced by systemd-sysv for wheezy upgrades

Gah, looks like that changed recently (I did an upgrade a couple of weeks back and it wasn't the case), and I can't edit my comment any more :(
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