How To Get LTS updates for Debian 6 (Squeeze)
Debian Squeeze (6.0) is the so named "Old Stable" branch of Debian, the official support for this version ended in April 2014. Squeeze is still used on many servers, so a group of Debian developers decided to provide security patches for a longer timespan for this release. These so called LTS updates (LTS = Long Term Support) are not available on the normal Debian update repository and not every user might be aware that he won't get these updates automatically. The following short guide explains how to enable the LTS repository and install the updates.
Add the new Debian LTS repository
Open the sources.list file with an editor:
vi /etc/apt/sources.list
and add the following 2 lines at the end of the /etc/apt/sources.list file:
deb http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian squeeze-lts main contrib non-free
deb-src http://ftp.uni-kl.de/debian/ squeeze-lts main contrib non-free
Please note: The updates are only provided for the i386 and amd64 architectures.
Installation of Debian updates
The updates are then installed as usual with apt. Run these commands to update the packagelist and install the updates:
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
Limitations
Not all packages will get security updates. To run a check if unsupported packages are installed on your Server, install the new package "debian-security-support".
apt-get install debian-security-support
A check if unsupprted packages are installed is run every time a package gets installed. You can run the test manually with:
check-support-status
