Ubuntu 12.04 LTS End of Life coming on April 28

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#1 Sat, 03/18/2017 - 12:13
Joe
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Ubuntu 12.04 LTS End of Life coming on April 28

Howdy all,

Ubuntu 12.04 is almost five years old, and that means Canonical will discontinue support for it in a few short weeks. And, that means we will discontinue support for it in Virtualmin (it would be crazy to run a distro on a world-facing server without regular updates). In short: If you still have any Ubuntu 12.04 LTS systems in production, now is the time to upgrade!

It's a few weeks away, which gives you ample time to upgrade to 14.04 LTS or 16.04 LTS (we always recommend the latest supported version of your preferred distribution). Upgrading Ubuntu can be done (mostly) using apt-get, so you can upgrade a server "in-place" without reinstalling the OS. You should, of course, plan for down time, and testing.

Eric wrote up some docs about upgrading from 12.04 to 14.04 here: https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/os/ubuntu-precise-to-trusty

And, some docs for upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 here (which is a more complicated upgrade than the former): https://www.virtualmin.com/documentation/system/os/ubuntu-trusty-to-xenial

If you really can't upgrade your 12.04 systems, Canonical offers the Extended Security Maintenance to paying customers, which will cover the most dangerous elements of the system.

It is also possible to backup your Virtualmin domains and configuration, and migrate them to a new system with a newer version of the OS (this still needs testing, as your apps may expect older versions of PHP or other packages, and may need some tweaks...Virtualmin handles a lot of that when restoring, but not all of the possibilities, by any means).

Fresh installs of Virtualmin on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS will no longer be available in our install script after the Virtualmin 6 release (coming really soon). And, we will disable our 12.04 LTS repository completely a few months after the OS reaches EOL.

Cheers,

Joe

Sat, 03/18/2017 - 18:48
Diabolico
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Why dont you disable the repository before 12.04 EOL? You will have people coming here to complain for problems or bugs what should be long gone.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Sun, 03/19/2017 - 03:18 (Reply to #2)
Joe
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It's what we've always done, and it's never been a major issue. We used to keep them running for a long time after EOL (like years), and even rolled our own updates out to them (though new installs weren't supported anymore). I can't remember it ever generating support requests or forum posts in any significant number. But, we get more emphatic over time; especially as the pace of security exploits increases, and running old systems becomes more dangerous more quickly. So, in a month or two after EOL, we'll shut'em down, and hopefully that'll clue in any stragglers who hadn't noticed that the distro has no support and no security updates.

Edit: Oh, and why not disable the repos before? Because we made a promise to support the distro until its end of life. That's always been our promise; we support the full lifecycle of the distros that we support. So, CentOS 5 will have support from us until end of this month, and Ubuntu 12.04LTS will have support from us until end of April.

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Sun, 03/19/2017 - 05:16
Diabolico
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Why not just push the notification on front page of Webmin/Virtualmin for admin account? This could be used for things like this or emergency update or anything else what would require immediate attention from the admin. Supporting OS like Centos 5 or Ubutnu 12.04 is bad and i dont see any logic in doing it. You should motivate people to switch to never OS for security and many other reasons not enforce their laziness or lack of care. You dont really have any valid explanation aside of - because we do in this way.

You told me many times how Virtualmin have tons of users but you are acting all the time like this isnt the case and every single one of them is too precious to lose, even when the logic requires you to do otherwise.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Mon, 03/20/2017 - 03:24 (Reply to #4)
Joe
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Sometimes I think you just like to argue with me.

I didn't invent enterprise life cycle planning. Virtualmin supports specific distributions for a specific time period; to keep it simple, it exactly mirrors the life cycle of the distribution in question. We choose long-lived distros (e.g. only LTS Ubuntu, and not Fedora) to support, because that's what most sysadmins and businesses want, and they want to know how long Virtualmin will be supported.

You're arguing we should randomly change that on a whim, and on no notice...Why? What good could possibly come of cutting people off during the last month or two of the distribution's life? As long as the distro is supported by the upstream vendor, we will support Virtualmin on it. Period. That's the assurance we give to businesses that rely on Virtualmin.

I love to see old distros go away, as it makes our job easier and the systems get nicer with time (generally, though sometimes horrible ideas like FirewallD show up in newer versions). But, I also recognize that many folks don't have the spare time to upgrade production servers that are working as they're supposed to, just because there's something new out there. If the distro is supported, that's fine.

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Mon, 03/20/2017 - 05:26
Diabolico
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I'm arguing for the same reason you mentioned:

I love to see old distros go away, as it makes our job easier and the systems get nicer with time

Didnt say just cut them out, but you could say Vmin version 5.XX will be the last version to support Centos 5 and do that 2-3 months before OS EOL. After that every new Vmin version will not support anymore old OS and you will have less things to worry and more time to focus on newer OS.

But, I also recognize that many folks don't have the spare time to upgrade production servers

I really hope you dont see this as valid excuse to keep using outdated OS.

- I often come to the conclusion that my brain has too many tabs open. -
Failing at desktop publishing & graphic design since 1994.

Mon, 03/20/2017 - 14:20 (Reply to #6)
Joe
Joe's picture

"Didnt say just cut them out, but you could say Vmin version 5.XX will be the last version to support Centos 5 and do that 2-3 months before OS EOL. After that every new Vmin version will not support anymore old OS and you will have less things to worry and more time to focus on newer OS."

I'm so confused. That's exactly what we do, and what I said we're doing! I explicitly said that the Virtualmin 6 installer will not support CentOS 5 or Ubuntu 12.04 LTS. And, I announced 1 month before the EOL of CentOS, and 1.5 months before EOL of Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (CentOS snuck up on me, and I didn't post as early as I'd intended).

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Fri, 04/07/2017 - 09:12
unborn
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12.04 is eol = end of life. you should not use it or at least update it to latest specially if you use something unstable for server like ubuntu. I am with joe on this. - personally ubuntu is just bad as windows for me on servers (my personal opinion and do not attack me for my personal opinion here), centos - never been using it and it does somehow suxs for me (and newbies) and perhaps due to my limited knowledge towards the linux it self - debian, very well stable for 7 years - just rock solid man.... want stable desktop and even more stable server? - use Debian or CentOS - those two should be only supported by virtualmin in future. No crappy os-es. (my whish list and hopefully future...) - in end of the day sure - use whatever you like to...

Yes OLD distros should be purged defo and same for crappy distros like mentioned ubuntu...

ps - I would very not advice any ubuntu version out there for server deployment.. you know how it is with desktops - dont go ubuntu even there.. also regards deploying your server in docking environment! if you real sysops you would understand that dock rubbish is nice and fast but no security at all.. please - just use centos or debian and be real on real servers..

Configuring/troubleshooting Debian servers is always great fun

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