lucumr

Yesterday we upgraded hammet (the server powering the Pocoo projects) to Ubuntu LTS. Unfortunately Ubuntu 8.04 aka hardy doesn’t ship Postgres 8.1 any longer so we had to upgrade to 8.3. If you are ever in the same situation: DON’T UNINSTALL 8.1. I did that because my applications showed an auth error and I guessed that was because of two running postgres servers. Turns out that postgres databases are incompatible between versions and the only way to upgrade a cluster is having both versions running and using pg_upgradecluster to upgrade them. Reinstalling in hardy won’t work because there is no package providing an 8.1 server.

What I did then was installing the 8.1 server again from dapper sources, delete the new cluster with “pg_dropcluster 8.3 main” and migrate with “pg_upgradecluster 8.1 main”. After that getting rid of the 8.1 cluster and server and most of it works again.

I fought that auth error by setting local socket connections to trusted in the config responsible for authentication and had to upgrade trac because implicit string casts no longer work.

Those non portable, version incompatible database files and the fact that I hate psql and those admin tools are by the way the reason why I feel more comfortable with MySQL.