The operating system running on our Debian-based web servers will become obsolete over time, so over time it will be necessary to completely upgrade the distribution. In this description, we will perform a complete upgrade of a Debian 9 (Stretch) web server to Debian 10 (Buster). There are many features on the server that will also be updated. On the first page of this description, we will perform the pre-upgrade steps to prepare your system for a secure upgrade.

Debian has introduced a new network interface naming scheme since Release 9 (Stretch). Instead of the usual Ethernet device names (eg eth0) or WLAN device names (eg wlan0), etc. - a newly installed Debian 9 Stretch system - uses names such as enp5s7 and wlp2s0, respectively. Debian 9 (Stretch) still handles these names, but Debian 10 (Buster) no longer. In this description, we will make the transition to using the new network interface names so that if you want to further upgrade your system, your network will work with Debian 10.

In this tutorial, we build a simple LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL / MariaDB, PHP) server based on Debian 9 (Stretch), which can be used to run web pages or even be a great tool for web developers. This page will install the MariaDB database management system and the Apache web server.