14.04 LTS is about to go EOL

[Zarathustra[H]]

....and boy do I have a lot of upgrading to do.

My KVM/LXC server just got its first reboot in about 6 months, and now I am going through upgrading VM after VM.

Anyone else in the same boat?


My most complicated upgrade will likely be my old MythBuntu backend that has been sitting at version 0.27 on a 14.04 install for 5 years, and is pretty complicated with all of its mysql database complications and NAS mounts.

Hopefully upgrades in place will work for everything, and I won't need to do too much troubleshooting....

 

[IdiotInCharge]

Following your progress- and wondering if you might try prototyping in a VM or another system?

Also wondering if you're going to move to 18.04.2 LTS, or perhaps wait for the CentOS release of RHEL8 (currently in beta) or something else?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Following your progress- and wondering if you might try prototyping in a VM or another system?

Also wondering if you're going to move to 18.04.2 LTS, or perhaps wait for the CentOS release of RHEL8 (currently in beta) or something else?

I'm keeping things simple.

This is in a home environment, not a production one, so I'm not doing much in the way of stability testing before going live.

My workflow is as follows:

1.) Shut down 14.04 VM to be updated
2.) Snapshot VM to be updated
3.) Power VM back up again
4.) Use apt to do a dist-upgrade to make sure everything is on the latest revision before upgrade
5.) Issue do-release-upgrade command to upgrade to 16.06
6.) re-enable any PPA's that may have been disabled during upgrade
7.) do another apt-dis-upgrade just to be safe
8.) Shut down vm.
9.) do an "after" snapshot
10.) power back up again, and do some brief sanity testing
11.) If everything appears to be working, move on to the next VM
12.) If anything goes wrong over the next few weeks, troubleshoot or roll back to 14.04 tempoerarily


I'm not going to go all the way to 18.04. I am much happier with t e older revisions. More testing has gone into them. They ought to be more stable. That and there are some not insignificant changes moving from release to release, so I'd rather just takee baby steps and deal; with whatever they changed going from 16.04 to 18.04 in two years.

 

[ChRoNo16]

Only server on that OS is my Minecraft box, most likely I will not upgrade it.

 

[Barometer]

I don't know about your KVM/LXC....but I just had to upgrade a 10.04 server to 18.04.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

I don't know about your KVM/LXC....but I just had to upgrade a 10.04 server to 18.04.

I'm currently using Proxmox which is based on Debian Stretch. It saved me the pain of setting up KVM and LXC on my own, and provided a nice web based management interface.

My 14.04 LTS Ubuntu Servers were all either VM's or containers on that server.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Also, I just learned something alarming.

LTS doesn't necessarily mean the same thing in Ubuntu's sub distributions as in Ubuntu main.

The main Ubuntu LTS releases have 5 years of support and security patches. Sub distributions can decide for themselves how long to have LTS support. In th ecase of Lubuntu and Xubuntu, they have decided that LTS means 3 years.

Most of the time I run my servers in headless console only mode. MythTV - however - is designed assuming you want graphics output, even if you are only running a backend like I ma, and thus requires a functioning desktop. I have been managing this server using X2GO on Xubuntu install. It's been on 14.04, so apparently support ended 2 years ago and I never realized because I assumed it was on the Ubuntu LTS schedule!

It still receives any security updates as part of the Ubuntu base, but anything related to the desktop environment has been languishing since 2017!!!

So just a heads up, If you use Lubuntu or Xubuntu for low resource desktop implementations, 14.04 expired 2 years ago, and 16.06 is about to expire this month. This means I am going to have to bring my MythTV server up to 18.04 (which I am dreading because of all the boneheaded changes associated with SystemD)

Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I really like ifupdown and configuring all of my network interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces like I always have, and I hate it when SystemD tries to take on more and more of that and move it.

 

[Barometer]

The CEO of Ubuntu ditched and ran...along with a TON of employees.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/...switches-to-gnome-shuttleworth-returns-as-ceo

I see LOTS of what I considered critical (or at least very handy and useful) apps stop being maintained.

On top of that i just find 18.04 NOT as nice as was 10.04 and 12.04.

Finally, the Ubuntu forums are full of salty, callous moderators and it's rare to get useful assistance.
NOT AT ALL like the early years of Ubuntu.

All things considered.....something's going on at Ubuntu...and it's not going to end well (without a MAJOR infrastructure rehab)......just an opinion.

That said...I've loved Ubuntu for years and it saddens me.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

The CEO of Ubuntu ditched and ran...along with a TON of employees.
https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/...switches-to-gnome-shuttleworth-returns-as-ceo

I see LOTS of what I considered critical (or at least very handy and useful) apps stop being maintained.

On top of that i just find 18.04 NOT as nice as was 10.04 and 12.04.

Finally, the Ubuntu forums are full of salty, callous moderators and it's rare to get useful assistance.
NOT AT ALL like the early years of Ubuntu.

All things considered.....something's going on at Ubuntu...and it's not going to end well (without a MAJOR infrastructure rehab)......just an opinion.

That said...I've loved Ubuntu for years and it saddens me.

Meh.

I think this is a positive turn of events.

Ubuntu finally ditched the disaster that was Unity/Mir. Unity and Mir were the two biggest internal projects they were working on, so clearly they don't need all of those people anymore.

I had been a big fan of Ubuntu for years, but when they made Unity the default desktop in 2011 with 11.04 (Natty) I started looking around for another OS, and eventually settled on Mint. (For desktop use, I continued using Ubuntu's Server Edition)

IMHO, Ubuntu had been going to shit ever since 2011 because of Unity/Mir, and only now that Unity and Mir are good and dead can it get back on track.

They are still doing other things I hate though. SystemD is a huge suckfest, and I hate Netplan. Ifupdown is so much better. This seems to be the way all distributions are going though, which sucks.

 

[Barometer]

Time will tell.

 

[IdiotInCharge]

They are still doing other things I hate though. SystemD is a huge suckfest, and I hate Netplan. Ifupdown is so much better. This seems to be the way all distributions are going though, which sucks.

They are- and they aren't going back. Worth learning at some point, really.

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

Hmm.

So I just updated a 16.04 Lubuntu install to 18.04, usning do-release-upgrade from the console.

After the upgrade, it is still using ifupdown configured in /etc/network/interfaces

I thought Netplan was the standard starting in 17.10? What gives? Does it just keep ifupdown in upgrade situations?

 

[Zarathustra[H]]

They are- and they aren't going back. Worth learning at some point, really.

Pisses me off.

I am all for change if it makes my life better.

Neither SystemD or Netplan make my life any better. Arbitrary nonsense changes IMHO.

SysV was not without its legacy problems either. I may be in the minority, but I really liked Upstart, which Ubuntu used between SysV and SystemD Sadly they killed that project, so it is dead

 

[IdiotInCharge]

After the upgrade, it is still using ifupdown configured in /etc/network/interfaces

I thought Netplan was the standard starting in 17.10? What gives? Does it just keep ifupdown in upgrade situations?

Command's there, binary's there, no reason to take it out?

I am all for change if it makes my life better.

Well, it made some lives better; gist I got was that it was a break from the 'philosophy' that was necessary to push Linux forward. I'm getting into the guts after the change so I can't really sympathize, but I do get the annoyance as well as the apparent catch-22 that distro developers face.