Static in the Ether

With the release of Ubuntu 8.10 (Hardy Heron) and its designation as the new LTS version, I decided to upgrade my one local server from Dapper to Hardy, with the small challenge of I didnt want to do it via a gui. This is partly because I did not have a X client on my laptop this morning, and partly because it will allow me to trial the upgrade of one of my Remote hosted systems.

Some issues specific to the Rhodes environment are noted at the end.

Get up to date:

aptitude update
aptitude upgrade
aptitude dist-upgrade

All fairly painless and out of the ordinary, bar the need to add the dapper-proposed repo to my /etc/apt/sources.list

Installing the requires base packages:

aptitude install update-manager-core

Before doing the upgrade I decided to set up the CDROM ISO as a local repository in order to save bandwidth whales etc.. (Having a system with real internet access, or a working apt-proxy may be a better solution). Once the Hardy DVD is available in a few weeks this may go a lot faster, as libraries such as QT and other components of main will be included in the larger image.

$ mount -t iso9660 -o loop ~bvi/ubuntu-8.04-server-i386.iso /cdrom
$ apt-cdrom add

This should show output similar tot he following as the CDROM is added tot he Repo list.

Using CD-ROM mount point /cdrom/
Unmounting CD-ROM
Waiting for disc...
Please insert a Disc in the drive and press enter
Mounting CD-ROM...
Identifying.. [b36baea778d37bbf48a3c8bd75b5cffb-2]
Scanning disc for index files..
Found 2 package indexes, 0 source indexes and 1 signatures
Found label 'Ubuntu-Server 8.04 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080423.2)'
...


And should add a to the top of your /etc/apt/sources.list similar to the following:

deb cdrom:[Ubuntu-Server 8.04 _Hardy Heron_ - Release i386 (20080423.2)]/ hardy main restricted

Finally the update can be performed

do-release-update -p

The -p parameter is due to the fact that the LTS as defined at http://changelogs.ubuntu.com/meta-release-lts is still showing dapper as the LTS, and should be able to be omitted in the future. with the -p, the meta-release-lts.proposed file is used instead.

the bulk of the base operating system was happily upgraded form CDROM repo in a matter of minutes, and the remaining pile of mostly universe and multiverse packages took around an hour to download

3 hours and a reboot later and the server is happily running Hardy.

All in all its about the same time for doing a ‘buildworld dance’ with FreeBSD, along with a massive level of portupgrade.

Post Reboot

In order to validate the upgrade, we can make use of the Linux Standard Base support for Debian
utilities ( aka lsb_release)

We have gone from:

$ uname -a
Linux spy.ict.ru.ac.za 2.6.15-51-686 #1 SMP PREEMPT Tue Feb 12 16:59:15 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
$ lsb_release -a (output trimmed)
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 6.06.2 LTS
Release: 6.06
Codename: dapper

To:

$ uname -a
Linux spy.ict.ru.ac.za 2.6.24-16-server #1 SMP Thu Apr 10 13:58:00 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux
$ lsb_release -a
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.04
Release: 8.04
Codename: hardy

In reflection, far less pain than I expected certainly not enough to make me want to employ a depenguinator on this server yet.

Rhodes Specific notes:

• Preferably use ubuntu.rucus.ru.ac.za as your repo unless you would like your quota flattened. Hopefully it will be up.
• ftp://ftp.rucus.ru.ac.za/pub/linux/ubuntu/hardy has the ISO files
• You will need appropriate proxy settings in order for the do-release-upgrade to be able to access the changelogs.ubuntu.com site.