The Debian Sarge/Etch Monstrosity
Chalk this win up to Debian being stable enough to run a few months with a Sarge/Etch kernel/userland mismatch.
What happened was one server that got ordered right around the Etch release would run Etch fine, but the hosting company still had to officially run Sarge because of the RAID controller. The upgrades were left to us, and all they would restore to is Sarge.
Anyway, cut to later this year - I noticed something wonky when aptitide was installing linux-image-2.6.18-*, but uname said I was running sarge’s 2.6.8 kernel. The real fun was that the uptime was 155 days on the old Sarge based system. What had happened was GRUB never got updated, so it kept using the old kernel.
travis@debian/etc $ cat debian_version
4.0
travis@debian/etc $ uname -mrs
Linux 2.6.8-3-k7-smp i686
travis@debian/etc $ sudo update-grub
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
Searching for default file ... Generating /boot/grub/default file and setting the default boot entry to 0
Searching for GRUB installation directory ... found: /boot/grub
Testing for an existing GRUB menu.lst file ... found: /boot/grub/menu.lst
Searching for splash image ... found: /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.18-5-k7
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.18-4-k7
Found kernel: /vmlinuz-2.6.8-3-k7-smp
Updating /boot/grub/menu.lst ... done
travis@debian/etc $ sudo shutdown -r now
[wait + ping + sweating bullets]
travis@debian~ $ uname -mrs
Linux debian 2.6.18-5-k7 #1 SMP Wed Sep 26 18:29:20 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux
Awesome. I was not happy to think about what would have happened if it didn’t come back online. I
If we had console access (which we didn’t at that host), I’m sure GRUB could have booted the old kernel from that, and then fix whatever happened. I have a feeling their would have been some something wrong rebooting a Sarge kernel into an Etch userland though. Would make an interesting experiment to see if it’s possible, or if some libc error botches it all.
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