For years my server has been running my personal websites and other services without a hitch. It was Ubuntu 16.04. More than four years old at this point. Only a year left on the 16.04 support schedule. Plus 20.04 is out. Time to move to the latest platform without rushing rather than make the transition with support ended or time running out.
With the above in mind I decided to upgrade my 16.04.6 server to 20.04 and get another five years of support on deck. I’m half way there, at 18.04.4, and hovering for the next little while before the bump up to 20.04. The pause is because of a behavior of do-release-upgrade
that I learned about while planning and testing the upgrade.
It turns out that do-release-upgrade
won’t actually run the upgrade until a version’s first point release is out. A switch, -d
, must be used to override that. Right now 20.04 is just that, 20.04. Once it’s 20.04.1 the upgrade will run without the switch. Per “How to upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to 20.04 LTS today” the switch, which is intended to enable upgrading to a development release, does the upgrade to 20.04 because it is released.
I’m interested to try out the VPN that is in 20.04, WireGuard, so may try the -d before 20.04.1 gets here. In the meantime let me tell you about the fun I had with the upgrade.
First, as you should always see in any story about upgrade, backup! I did, several different ways. Mostly as experiments to see if I want to change how I’m doing it, rsync. An optional feature of 20.04 that looks to make backup simpler and more comprehensive is ZFS. It’s newly integrated into Ubuntu and I want to try it for backups.
I got my backups then took the server offline to get a system image with Clonezilla. Then I used VBoxManage convertfromraw
to turn the Clonezilla disk image into a VDI file. That gave me a clone of the server in VirtualBox to practice upgrading and work out any kinks.
The server runs several websites, a MySQL server for the websites and other things, an SSH server for remote access, NFS, phpmyadmin, DNS, and more. They are either accessed remotely or from a LAN client. Testing those functions required connecting a client to the server. VirtualBox made that a simple trick.
In the end my lab setup was two virtual machines, my cloned server and a client, on a virtual network. DHCP for the client was provided by the VirtualBox Internal Network, the server had a fixed ip on the same subnet as the VirtualBox Internal Network and the server provided DNS for the network.
I ran the 16.04 to 18.04 upgrade on the server numerous times taking snapshots to roll back as I made tweaks to the process to confirm each feature worked. Once I had a final process I did the upgrade on the virtual machine three times to see if I could find anything I might have missed or some clarification to make to the document. Success x3 with no changes to the document!
Finally I ran the upgrade on the production hardware. Went exactly as per the document which of course is a good thing. Uneventful but slower than doing it on the virtual machine, which was expected. The virtual machine host is at least five years newer than the server hardware and has an SSD too.
I’ll continue running on 18.04 for a while and monitor logs for things I might have missed. Once I’m convinced everything is good then I’ll either use -d to get to 20.04 or wait until 20.04.1 is out and do it then.