Arch Linux

punkeroso

Member

From: Rome, Italy

Registered: 2007-01-19

Posts: 105

Upgrading a 4 years old system

Hi,

long story short, I'm trying to upgrade a 4 years old production server that has been updated very rarely.
The first attempt gave me this error:

downloading required keys...
:: Import PGP key 256?/, "Gaetan Bisson <bisson@gaati.org>", created: 1998-03-24? [Y/n]
error: key "Gaetan Bisson <bisson@gaati.org>" could not be imported
error: required key missing from keyring
error: failed to commit transaction (unexpected error)
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

with a lot of packages to upgrade.

Then I tried to fix the keys problem by doing:

pacman -Sy archlinux-keyring
rm -r /etc/pacman.d/gnupg
rm -r /root/.gnupg
dirmngr < /dev/null
gpg --refresh-keys
pacman-key --init 
pacman-key --populate
pacman-key --refresh-keys
pacman -Syu

But I got the same key error.

So I tried to disabling the signature verification and trying to upgrade the system again but:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files)
filesystem: /bin exists in filesystem
filesystem: /sbin exists in filesystem
filesystem: /usr/sbin exists in filesystem
Errors occurred, no packages were upgraded.

pacman -Qi filesystem
Name            : filesystem
Version         : 2013.01-3
Description     : Base filesystem
Architecture    : x86_64
URL             : http://www.archlinux.org
Licenses        : GPL
Groups          : base
Provides        : None
Depends On      : iana-etc
Optional Deps   : None
Required By     : dbus  fakeroot  glibc  mkinitcpio
Optional For    : None
Conflicts With  : None
Replaces        : None
Installed Size  : 316.00 KiB
Packager        : Allan McRae <allan@archlinux.org>
Build Date      : Sun 27 Jan 2013 08:29:49 AM CET
Install Date    : Tue 19 Feb 2013 04:26:58 PM CET
Install Reason  : Explicitly installed
Install Script  : Yes
Validated By    : Unknown

Now, here are the questions:
1. It's safe to overwrite the filesystem package (and for sure there will be other packages that would do the same)?
2. It's worth trying to upgrade the system or should be better reinstalling the entire system? This is a production environment so I would avoid starting from scratch.
3. Any other advice?

Thanks a lot

a821

Member

Registered: 2012-10-31

Posts: 381

Re: Upgrading a 4 years old system

You can use the ALA (https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Archive) for incremental updates (maybe every 2-3 months) and check the old news for important events, eg, the upgrade to pacman 5.0.

or just simply reinstall...

Xyne

Administrator/PM

Registered: 2008-08-03

Posts: 6,963

Website

Re: Upgrading a 4 years old system

Reinstalling would be simpler. You should be able to just remount the existing system in a chroot from the Arch live cd and then pacstrap it into the present with a little manual intervention.

If you nevertheless want to walk it through the last 4 years, you may find alatools useful, if ALA goes back that far (there was some discussion about removing old packages to save space). Check your pacman logs for the last system update, then walk through all of the news items that require manual intervention, in chronological order (using e.g. ala-config --data <date> --pacman -S...).

Again, re-installation will be much easier, but I'm curious to know if ala-config could actually handle this. There may be issues with old pgp keys.

---

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loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 17,327

Re: Upgrading a 4 years old system

If this is going to be a repeat issue please consider changing the distribution for that system to one that supports automatic updates.