For those Ubuntu users out there, you are likely aware of the latest release, Gutsy Gibbon.Some of my buddies at work were wondering if I had upgraded the cluster o' servers in my office yet. The answer, at least until about 10pm tonight was no. In fact, after the last upgrade to Feisty Fawn, I was somewhat hesitant to ever upgrade again.

Some of you might remember my last blog about an Ubuntu upgrade, The Champ is Here. Let's just say that things didn't go all that smooth and it resulted in missing a few dozen hours of sleep. One of the biggest problems I ran into in the last upgrade was just some strangeness on how the upgrade handled my RAID1 setup. After upgrading, the result was an unbootable system and a few choice words targeted at Feisty.

This time around, I did some research ahead of time and tried to nail down if anyone had been experiencing any problems with upgrading, especially when they had some RAID going on. For the most part, nothing too interesting in the forums that I hadn't seen before, so I gave the upgrade a shot after backing up everything to an external USB drive.

Phobos upgrade (file server) - October 23, 2007

sudo apt-get install update-manager-core

sudo do-release-upgrade

Crossing my fingers, I watched as all the updates flew past my little LCD screen mounted on the wall. For the most part, no errors, just a few .conf files that needed merged. Whew, so far so good. After all the packages were happy, the "time to reboot" screen appeared. After typing "Y", I crossed my fingers and walked out of the room so I didn't put any added pressure on good old Gusty's first boot on the file server. 

Upon coming back into the office, I had a cute little screen telling me that it couldn't find any of the boot devices and more importantly, it decided booting wasn't part of the agenda for this upgrade all by itself. Fearful that what happened on my Feisty upgrade once again occurred, I quickly pressed the reset button. Low and behold, I didn't receive that error again, instead, just a blank screen. That's no fun. Rebooted several more times with the same behavior, a nice, black, screen full of nothing.

For whatever reason, I thought that it might have actually booted, just not displayed so I tried to login via ssh. Bingo, I was in like nobody's business. So, determined to figure this out, I resorted to the forums again. Turns out, plenty of people reported this blank screen issue and they are actually tracking it as a bug over on Launchpad. After some tinkering, here's what is necessary to resolve this problem, at least on my configuration.

1) Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/modules and add:

fbcon
vesafb
vga16fb

2) Change /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-framebuffer as so:
blacklist vesafb -> #blacklist vesafb
blacklist vga16fb -> #blacklist vga16fb

3) sudo update-initramfs -u

4) reboot

No promises, but that might help you out if you experience similar behavior. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing with the first of four upgrades.

Cerberus upgrade (router/firewall) - October 24, 2007

Smooth sailing with knowledge of the previous upgrade issues. Same deal as last time, only the curveball here was that I couldn't see the screen and thought the system didn't come back up. Apparently it hadn't checked the disks in a while and decided to do so, which was apparent when I rebooted into 'recovery mode'.

System is up and running...whoo hoo! 

Icepick upgrade (web server) - October 25, 2007

Man, I must have slipped and fell in a puddle of good luck. This upgrade took less than 30 minutes and using the previous issues as fodder for this one, I had it up and running in no time. This is relieving considering how the custom setup on the web server would take hours to redo.

Arioch upgrade (mail server) - October 30-November 1, 2007

I hate computers, period. No lie, this took me 3 days at one of the nights I was up till 3am. This upgrade was a little different than the others in that this server was running Edgy, not Feisty so I would be skipping Feisty and going right to Gutsy. Why? Well, because Zimbra doesn't yet support the 7.x versions of Ubuntu. You can make it work, but I wasn't going to take my chances, not till Gutsy came out at least. Here's a quick summary of the events over these 3 days:

1. Network upgrade from Edgy to Feisty
2. Upgrade fails, console says report it as a bug, system is probably unstable
3. System boots fine despite what the upgrade script reported
4. Network upgrade attempt to Gutsy
5. Upgrade needed 89mb space on /boot, I only had 41mb
6. Rather than gpart things, I decided to start from scratch
7. Backed up /opt/zimbra directory
8. Backed up mail folders via Mail.app archive function in Leopard
9. Installed Gutsy and it got it up and running
10. Moving /opt/zimbra and upgrading didn't work
11. Needed to install same version of Zimbra and then upgrade
12. Previous step took me about 10 hours to finally figure out
13. After getting Zimbra functioning again at 4.5.4, I upgraded to 4.5.9
14. Upgrade failed again, but doing a ./install -s worked
15. Zimbra up and running again
16. Mail server doesn't like PermitRootLogin in sshd like the other systems
17. Figured out PermitRootLogin issue, not that I like the solution
18. System up and running again

I guess the good news is that all the servers are running Gutsy with no data loss. The bad news is, I lost way too much time doing this upgrade...not that this type of thing isn't normal for me.

No more upgrades for at least 6 months please!