Upgrade 10.04 to 14.04?

[Tom H]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2014 at 11:56 PM, Karl Auer <kauer at biplane.com.au> wrote:


> We have a client who is running an Ubuntu 10.04 server. They want to
> upgrade to 14.04. The machine is running 4x500GB HDD in a RAID10
> configuration as md0.
>
> Can I reasonably expect to be able to upgrade this machine, or should I
> bite the bullet and re-install?
>
> The process seems to involve upgrading through the other LTS releases,
> so that's actually two upgrades - 10.04 to 12.04 and 12.04 to 14.04.
> Still seems to offer lots of opportunity for fail.

I'd bite the bullet and rebuild.


> And assuming I do try an upgrade, what's the apt-get way to do it? I
> don't have a GUI on the server, and just about every answer on the 'net
> talks about upgrading desktops. "do-release-upgrade -m server" seems to
> be designed to do this, but there is no way to control the target
> version; I'm a bit concerned that it will try to go straight to 14.04.

"do-release-upgrade -m server" is the right command but your question
about the target version's interesting! I'd test it in a VM first with
a minimal install.

You can use apt-get and inspire yourself from the Debian release notes
to create your own procedure. From memory, it probably amounts to:
check and remove dpkg and aptitude holds, check and disable apt
pinning, disable non-standard repos like ppas, dist-upgrade, change
sources.list to 12.04, and "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade ; apt-get
dist-upgrade" (or even "apt-get update ; apt-get dist-upgrade"). I'd
break up the upgrade more rather than less, for example by upgrading
dpkg first.


> Can I do it from CD/USB? Internet access at this location is very slow,
> and the downloads will be around 2GB.

"do-release-upgrade" is a python script so you could try to modify it;
but there'll be yet more testing involved.


> Actually the more questions I ask the more convinced I become that I
> should just re-install.

Me too.