Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to 18.04

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#1 Sat, 02/09/2019 - 03:12

fuerst

Upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 to 18.04

Hi anyone,

I saw the guide for upgrading Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty to 16.04 Xenial at https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/upgrades-and-migrations. There is no guide for upgrading 16.04 to 18.04 or even 14.04 to 18.04. Since I run a Ubuntu 14.04 server I think it is time to upgrade to one of the newer LTS Ubuntu's. Has anyone experience in this? What would be your advice?

Thanks a lot!

BTW: Newer PHP versions are of no concern here.

#2 Wed, 02/27/2019 - 04:39

unborn

hi fuerst,

if you looking to upgrade from that very old distro to 16.04 or even 14.04 to 18.04 - I would suggest you to go with fresh install. Since 14.04 apache and other softwares made some serious changes to configs which will not work any more after you upgrade, means if you do just standard backup and restore you could be left with 500 errors or others. I would do manually backup everything then install latest os with latest virtualmin and restore site by site manually with settings of course. Test the site and if no problem - let it run life. Perhaps good advice would be testing everything in virtualbox before you even do move to the real server, as this will give you an idea what needs to be changed and makes process much smoother.

Good luck and have a fun :)

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

#3 Thu, 03/28/2019 - 02:33

fuerst

Thanks a lot! I too think it would be better to install a new server instead of upgrading. Virtualmin allows transfering virtual servers from the old to the new server using it's command line tool which works great.

#4 Thu, 03/28/2019 - 10:16

hescominsoon

the webinterface backup system makes it even easier. just do a full backup(including the virt config) download that..nuke and pave..reinstall virt..restore form your backup..and 90% of your work is done.

#5 Sun, 03/31/2019 - 02:15 (Reply to #4)

fuerst

You are right -that probably is the more comfortable way. Also it can be tested on a new Virtual Machine and in case of success the IP address of the old machine will be switched to the new machine. You may need a backup MX server to not loose any email during creating/restoring the backup.

#6 Sun, 03/31/2019 - 09:05

andreychek

Howdy,

I actually just upgraded one of my own personal servers from 14.04 to 18.04.

It's necessary to first jump to 16.04 in that, but it did work.

What I did is use the Virtualmin docs for upgrading 14.04 to 16.04, and then once that was complete, I ran "do-release-upgrade" to update to 18.04.

In my case, it took about an hour and a half in all.

Note that I made a snapshot of the server, and performed the upgrade on a test system before making any changes to the live system. I also ensured that I had good backups of the full server, of Virtualmin, and I also made a backup of /etc too just to be safe.

-Eric

#7 Thu, 05/23/2019 - 07:27 (Reply to #6)

fuerst

Thanks a lot for sharing your experience!

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