Well, this was a big publishing gap. Four months. Hope not to have such a long one again. Anyway, there are a number of drafts in the wings but I decided to publish about this most recent change because it is what I wanted to get done before publishing again.
The server is now at Ubuntu 20.04, 64‑bit of course. It started out at 16.04 32‑bit, got upgraded to 18.04 i686 and then, attempted 20.04 upgrade and couldn’t because had forgotten was legacy 32‑bit and 20.04 only available in 64-bit. On to other things and plan different upgrade solution. When I got back to it I thought should upgrade to 22.04 since that had been released. As I’m going through the upgrade requirements I discovered that several needed applications didn’t have 22.04 packages yet, particularly Certbot and MySQL. So back to 20.04 and complete the upgrade.
MySQL upgrade wasn’t too bad. There was a failure, but it was common and a usable fix for the column-statistics issue was found quickly. Disable column-statistics during mysqldump (mysqldump -u root -p --all-databases --column-statistics=0 -r dump_file_name.sql).
Also, switched to the Community Edition rather than the Ubuntu packages because of recommendations online at MySQL about the Ubuntu package not being so up to date.
Fortunately I’m dealing with small databases with few transactions so mysqldump was my upgrade solution. Dump the databases from v 5.x 32-bit. Load them into v 8.x 64-bit. But wait, not all the user accounts are there!!
select * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMA_PRIVILEGES; will show only two grantees, 'mysql.sys'@'localhost' and 'mysql.session'@'localhost'. There should be about 20. The solution was simple, add upgrade = force to mysql.cfg and restart the server. After this, select * from INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMA_PRIVILEGES; shows all the expected accounts AND the logins function and the correct databases are accessible to the accounts.
All the other applications upgraded successfully. DNS, ddclient, Apache2, and etc. It was an interesting exercise to complete and moved the server onto newer, smaller hardware and updated the OS to 64-bit Ubuntu 20.04.
I’ll monitor for 22.04 packages for Certbot and MySQL and once I see them, update the OS again to get it to 22.04. Always better to have more time before needing (being forced) to upgrade. 20.04 is already about halfway through its supported life. Better to be on 22.04 and have almost five years until needing to do the next upgrade.
Doing all this in a virtual environment is a great time saver and trouble spotter. Gotchas and conflicts can be resolved so the actual activation, virtual or physical, goes about as smoothly as could be hoped with so many dependencies and layers of architecture. Really engrossing stuff if you’re so inclined.
DHCP on the server was new. The router doing DHCP only allowed my internal DNS as secondary. That seemed to cause issues reaching local hosts, sometimes the name would resolve to the public not the private IP. Switching to DHCP on the server lets it be specified as THE DNS authority on the network.
Watching syslog to see the messages, the utility of having addressable names for all hosts seemed obvious. A next virtual project, update DNS from DHCP.