[Pkg-utopia-maintainers] Bug#504918: [Debian Wiki] Update of "NewInLenny" : Upgrade over SSH issue

[Stuart Prescott]

Hi Franklin,

> (I hope you are the right "Stuart")

yes, indeed.

> I didn't found a bug report from you. However I fount those two bug that
> are similar.
>
> * Network-manager shouldn't stop the network during an upgrade
>   http://bugs.debian.org/474352
> * Updating to lenny failed when NetworkManager got updated
>   http://bugs.debian.org/504918

These are indeed related bugs. 

In message #10 of #474352, the maintainer notes that this bug should be fixed 
now, or at least mitigated [ "minimize the downtime (with ethernet it's a 
matter of seconds)"].

Depending on the ssh settings and the user's reaction to seeing the upgrade 
hang, that may or may not work out OK. If it is a wireless connection, 
however, the downtime can be much longer and my experience is that it is 
likely to hang.

> It looks like it could hurt many user that upgrade [lots of] desktops
> over ssh.

Possibly -- but would they use network manager in such a situation? (I don't 
know). My feeling is that it would be fairly uncommon to upgrade over ssh for 
machines that actually used network manager; the intersection of 
upgrade-over-ssh and users of network manager (which is a desktop-centric 
tool) would seem small.

As such, I had thought it was probably just a "document that you shouldn't do 
this" situation rather than an RC bug in network-manager. In the same way 
that upgrading over telnet or within a gdm session is not supported, this is 
just documented rather than being a grave bug in the package. See section 
4.1.4 of the etch release notes (which is currently unchanged in the lenny 
release notes) which explicitly warns against upgrading within a telnet, 
rlogin, rsh, xdm, gdm or kdm session.

I doubt this is something that can or will be cured before lenny releases so 
I'm guessing that this is going to be "fixed" by documentation for the time 
being at least. (Which is why I flagged it as an issue in the release notes 
wiki.)

Happy hunting!

cheers,
Stuart




-- 
Stuart Prescott                 www.nanoNANOnano.net