Server upgrade to openSUSE 11.2

I had been planning to upgrade the software on the server once openSUSE 11.2 was released but the timing was not planned in the way I would have liked if you read my notes on mythTV you will see that the need to get my slace backend connected forced the upgrade of mythTV on the server which, sort of, forced the whole machine to be upgraded. As this machine had developed over a number of years I didn't want to lose all the tweaks and setting I had developed so I backed up all the useful directories (/etc, /usr, /var, /home) onto the drive I use for storing the mythTV recorded programs. I then disconnected this drive from the system until the initial upgrade was complete.

The system initially used SuSE 8.2 and had been upgraded many times since then going from i386 to x86_64 along the way. Although this manitained a lot of the tweaks and settings it did introduce all sorts of problems with old files and libraries hanging around that would come back to bite me when I was not looking.

I will add some notes on things that caught me out when I upgraded

Bind (local DNS server)

I run bind (Named) on my server to cache the DNS requests from the connected machines. This helps to speed things up when browsing. To do this I set /etc/resolv.conf to read  nameserver 127.0.0.1 . This makes the DNS lookup use the local server rather than go straight out to the DNS server of my ISP. To stop Named modifying the resolv.conf I editted /etc/sysconfig/network/config and removed dns-resolver from the NETCONFIG_MODULES_ORDER entry.

In the /etc/named.conf file I have   include "/etc/named.d/forwarders.conf"  which allows the IP address of the DNS server at my ISP to be passed to named. It took me a while to find out why this file was not being written when dhcpcd got the IP information from the ADSL modem and brought the ethernet port up. I eventually found the reason was that NETCONFIG_DNS_FORWARDER in /etc/sysconfig/network/config was set to "resolv" but I needed it set to "bind". I only found this by reading the code in the scripts directory and I have no idea where/if it is documented.

Mysql (Database)

I run mysql to hold databases for MythTV and motion.

A couple of weeks after I upgraded to 11.2 I realised that I wasn't receiving any new emails. I had been away for a couple of days so I wasn't sure when they had stopped. After looking around on the server I realised that the root (/) partition was 100% full and as /var/spool/mail was on this partition postfix was rejecting all mail with a no space error message. Using   du -s  on each of the directories I eventually found that all the space was occupied by files in the /var/lib/mysql directory. There was quite a few mysql-bin.0000x files, each 1 Gb. 

It appears that the default for saving binary logs has changed and the MythTV creates a lot of transactions to be recorded. In /etc/my.cnf  I had  log-bin=mysql-bin. I thought this was a switch so I made log-bin=off. WRONG WRONG

I realised this was not correct when the server ran out of space again, this time with lots of off.0000x files. When I commented out the log-bin entry the mysql server would not start and there was an error in the mysql log file. I realised I needed to get rid of all commands related to logging and I still had a binlog_format entry. When this was commented out all went well.