Ubuntu [Breezer/Dapper] To Edgy Upgrade Notes

[retep]

Hi. Edgy was released last week.

So far a couple of brave souls have tried a dist-upgrade to the new distro. And ended up with unbootable VPSs.

See also:
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/10/28/239258

We're going to spend a bit of time investigating the issue and seeing if we can identify what the problem is, if any, and come up with some guidelines for helping do the upgrade (if you even need/want it).

We will post those notes here.

In the meantime please hold off doing a dist-upgrade?

[jamieflournoy]

I have a few test systems (including a setup very similar to my VPS) that I upgraded first before going for it on my RimuHosting VPS. No hitches, except for the usual hand-merging of a config file here and there (for MySQL and Dovecot). My VPS is on Edgy now.

I used the "official command line method":
1) search 'n replace 'dapper' with 'edgy' in /etc/apt/sources.list
2) apt-get update
3) 'apt-get dist-upgrade'
3a) 'apt-get dist-upgrade' again
4) reboot.

Speculation about why I didn't have big problems:
1) I kept Dapper very very current, so maybe more conservative admins with older Dapper packages (following the ain't-broke=don't-fix strategy) might exercise bugs in the upgrade process which would not be visible to me. (I'm following the latest-stable=fewer-bugs/less-hackable strategy myself.)

2) I've been born again in the package management religion, so I don't have anything remotely strange on my VPS - just config file edits and rsync-ed content, on top of standard packages.

[retep]

Good to hear.

Actually if anyone wants us to 'try' an upgrade on their server, just pop in a support ticket. Ask us to run a backup of your VPS, do the upgrade, and we'll see how it goes (and back out to the backup if there is an issue). Just mention this post's url. I'd imagine there'd be an hour or two's 'outage'/unusability to do this. Offer valid until its not, or, say, 7 november. By which time we should have some good guidelines for a DIY upgrade anyway.

Cheers, Peter

[carl]

Doing the following worked for upgrading from 'dapper' to 'edgy'.

replace "dapper" "edgy" -- /etc/apt/sources.list
apt-get update
aptitude dist-upgrade

If you get errors relating to 'sasl2-bin', the easy fix is:

apt-get remove sasl2-bin
dpkg --purge sasl2-bin
apt-get install sasl2-bin

In /etc/default/saslauthd, uncomment the 'START=yes' line.

And add:

PARAMS="-m /var/spool/postfix/var/run/saslauthd"

Then keep doing 'aptitude dist-upgrade' until there are no packages left to upgrade.

Note: Tested on a regular Dapper install only. Depending on what other packages you have, you may need to fix other packages before you can dist-upgrade. If you haven't done a complete dist-upgrade, do not reboot your VPS.