Upgrading Sympl from buster to bullseye

General Discussion
1

Although it’s not recommended to upgrade, I thought I’d risk it and try since it’s worked ok in the past with Symboisis.

The steps that I took:

First I ran a small VPS on Mythic Beasts with on demand pricing with a Bullseye Sympl install. I copied the updated the sources in /etc/apt/sources.list and the files in /etc/apt/sources.list.d on the VPS to upgrade.

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade

Asked to restart services during package upgrades, I said yes.

Asked about /etc/tunserver.conf, I took the package maintainer’s version:

Configuration file '/etc/turnserver.conf'
 ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
   What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
    Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
      D     : show the differences between the versions
      Z     : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** turnserver.conf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ?
Y

Upgrade round cube database: Yes

Roundcube config.inc.php: I kept the local version

I ran: sudo apt full-upgrade.

Asked about MariaDB/MySQL config file, I said install package maintainers version:

Configuration file '/etc/mysql/mariadb.conf.d/50-server.cnf'
 ==> Modified (by you or by a script) since installation.
 ==> Package distributor has shipped an updated version.
   What would you like to do about it ?  Your options are:
    Y or I  : install the package maintainer's version
    N or O  : keep your currently-installed version
      D     : show the differences between the versions
      Z     : start a shell to examine the situation
 The default action is to keep your current version.
*** 50-server.cnf (Y/I/N/O/D/Z) [default=N] ? 
Y

Restart the VM: sudo systemctl reboot

Remove the stale packages: sudo apt autoremove

Checked Nectcloud which highlighted the memory limit being below the recommended 512MB that’s recommended, so I edited the config and restarted apache2:

sudo vim /etc/php/7.4/apache2/php.ini
# Find memory_limit and increase to 512M
sudo service apache2 restart

All Nectcloud checks in the web admin passed

The cron for Nextcloud was erroring, so I added --define apc.enable_cli=1 to the cron job call:

sudo -u www-data crontab -e

One final issue that I found is with sympl-monit where I’ve been getting the following errors to root@server:

Started Sympl service monitor.
 INFO Runner: mysqld: Checking service is enabled
 INFO Runner: mysqld: Connection test errored - Refusing to operate on alias name or linked unit file: mysqld.service; caused by 3 sender=:1.2 -> dest=:1.1198 serial=84316 reply_serial=33 path=; interface=; member= error_name=org.freedesktop.systemd1.UnitLinked
 WARN Runner: mysqld: FAILED: Service unavailable
 INFO Runner: RESULT: 9/10 passed.

I tried running the check it was doing: /usr/bin/mysqladmin --defaults-extra-file=/etc/mysql/debian.cnf ping, however that returned ok, so not sure of the cause.

As a workaround I’ve removed the mysqld check for now to avoid being spammed: sudo rm /etc/sympl/monit.d/mysqld.

Other than that I’ve not spotted another issues yet.

In a trial upgrade from a clean buster Sympl install to bullseye I had noticed an issue with the old version of php still being used so Apache2 wouldn’t start. Enabling PHP7.4 and disabling PHP7.3 resolved it in that case. I’m not sure what the difference was compared to my main setup.

2

Interesting to read. I’m guessing that this was all needed because Nextcloud needs 7.4 for its next release.

I bitterly regret falling for the Nextcloud hype.

I think I’m going to bite the bullet and start again with Owncloud, which is more dependable, more stable and doesn’t trap you in a merry-go-round of half-tested releases that drop support for distributions that are still current.

3

I generally like to keep in sync with the OS updates as much as possible so the upgrade was inevitable irrespective of Nextcloud.

Nextcloud is quite fast moving, I’ve not had issues keeping up yet all a nice learning experience. I also moved from Owncloud to Nextcloud shortly after installing it.

4

There have been loads of issues with half-tested releases of Nextcloud, though most of the problems vhave been in features that aren’t in Owncloud - and which I don’t use.
One of the reasons for choosing Debian as the distro is that it tends to keep back from the bleeding edge.
This makes it more stable and dependable, but it also means that go-getting projects like Nextcloud tend to see what is current on Debian as almost obsolete.
Having worked in IT for decades, I’ve learned that a reliable setup hangs back from early updates.
If you use the features that Nextcloud has and Owncloud hasn’t, using Nextcloud makes sense. Otherwise, best play safe.
I’m really writing this to warn people like me, not specifically for your benefit.
I originally thought that Nextcloud was more actively maintained and would therefore get better support.
Turns out I was wrong. Nextcloud just churns out unfinished updates and additions, sometimes without proper system testing, dumping LTS distributions months or years early.

5

:slight_smile:

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6

Just to add to this, I ran into the same problem upgrading this afternoon (all the other wiki instructions worked flawlessly). In case anyone wants the exact commands to run (as root):

cd /etc/apache2/mods-available
a2dismod php7.3
a2enmod php7.4
systemctl restart apache2

I have WordPress and MediaWiki sites, plus some custom PHP, and I had installed a few extra PHP extensions (php-intl and others, mainly for MediaWiki).

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