Upgrade baron and all VMs to openSUSE-13.2

[zooey]

Baron and the VMs are currently running openSUSE-13.1, but 13.2 has been published three months ago. I have used 13.2 on several of my own systems without much problems, so I reckon it's safe to upgrade our infrastructure to it.

As usual, one interesting topic could be the upgrading of Postgresql (as newer versions of Postgresql are unable to read older DB formats, so an explicit dump/restore might be necessay). In order to simplify this, openSUSE has started to provide different versions of Postgresql as packages, so hopefully this will be easier this time around.

Another point of interest is that 13.1 introduced a problem with ssh logins using PAM being unbearably slow, which caused me to deactivate PAM for ssh logins. If 13.2 fixes the slowness (and my experience with my own server seems to suggest it does) it would be good to activate PAM again, as otherwise alternative/additional authentication methods like OTP wouldn't be possible to implement.

[Centinel]

Per my conversation with zooey earlier today, it is my suggestion that we keep Baron and the VMs on OpenSUSE 13.1 since it's an "Evergreen" long-term support release that will receive updates for an extended period of time - 3 years, I think.

Older software is often more reliable since it has had time for the bugs to be worked out. If we keep everything on OpenSUSE 13.1 and upgrade individual packages as needed, we can introduce new software on a stable base.

For instance, we upgraded OpenSSH on VMWeb earlier today. That may fix the SSH/PAM problem.

[nielx]

I have been working on moving services that depend on python (like Trac and Pootle) to using their own virtual python env for the application packages, so it is not a problem that the python interpreter itself is updated less often.

So for me it is not an issue to use a LTS release.

[nielx]

Won't be fixed as we are moving to a new server