Upgrade from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Hi my server has been running ubuntu 14.04 for over a year now, no problems ... I logged in via ssh & was presented with the option to upgrade to 16.04 "do-release-upgrade" which I did ... after the upgrade Virtualmin failed to work each server failed to load php (it appeared they were looking for PHP 5 which the upgrade to 16.04) along with a load of other apache modules that had been removed or renamed. As this is a VPS I reprofiled the space to default (12.04) and did the 2 upgrades to 16.04 eg -12.04 -> 14.04-> 16.04, then installed Virtualmin this also failed for the same reasons outlined above .. the fix was to re profile back to 12.04, remove the lamp stack do the 2 upgrades then install Virtualmin via install.sh. The question is :- is there a safe method to run 'do-release-upgrade' with a space that has Lamp & Virtualmin already installed (I have another server that at the moment is at 14.04 & I don't want to follow the above process to upgrade to 16.04) as the sites located on that server need to be up 99% min Regards Jim

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Howdy -- could you share the exact error(s) that you were receiving?

There's likely a way to resolve the issue you were seeing.

However, I'll do some testing to see if I can reproduce that, and we'll provide instructions on how to perform an upgrade.

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Submitted by jimr on Sun, 08/07/2016 - 05:21 Pro Licensee

As do-release-upgrade ran, I was seeing errors ( I can not remember which modules but apache2 was one) had no release candidate, after the upgrade was done, and the server restarted all domains pointed to /var/www/html. The virtual server tab under webmin->apache2 showed the correct data e.g /home/user/public_html. When the server was in this state if I created a new server virtualmin recorded the correct path but served /var/www/html.

All domains in virtual min had options to edit the settings for PHP 5 & PHP 7 but virtual min correctly reported that only PHP 7 was installed. With 16.04 installed I uninstalled Apache2, PHP 7 & mysql (using the purge option) then reinstalled them ... this went correctly with no errors however, I then reinstalled all the domains from backups all domains still served /var/www/html ... I did try 4 attempts at installing 1) 12.04 -> install webmin -> upgrade -> 14.04 (worked) -> upgrade -> 16.04 (fail) 2) 12.04 -> 14.04 -> install webmin (worked) -> upgrade ->16.04 (fail) 3) 12.04 -> 14.04 ->16.04-> install webmin (fail) 4) 12.04 -> purge the lamp stack ->upgrade 14.04 -> upgrade 16.04 -> install webmin (worked) note all webmin installs were done using install.sh the errors I saw perhaps are problems with the do-release-upgrade process of Ubuntu 16.04 and not webmin but others may fall foul of this.

On another note after I got it working on 16.04 I used virtualmin to install phpmyadmin to a domain this failed as php-mbstring php-gettext were not installed after installing these manually phpmyadmin worked Regards Jim

Okay, thanks for the info!

My guess is that during the upgrade process, Ubuntu added some sort of default domain that was overriding your existing domains. It's possible that's just a matter of deleting the newly added domain (which might be 000-default).

It's possible to install the mbstring package by installing "Package php7.0-mbstring". However, Virtualmin is supposed to be able to do that automatically, so it's possible the package name isn't what it expects.

We'll need to review that, along with the PHP issues you're describing though. Thanks for all the info!

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Submitted by jimr on Sun, 08/07/2016 - 10:15 Pro Licensee

Other things I have noticed after I got webmin working on 16.04 the fail2ban shows a new jail called 'INCLUDES' I can not find this file in /etc/fail2ban/filter.d# but there is a section in jail.conf

[INCLUDES]

rem before = paths-distro.conf before = paths-debian.conf

rem The DEFAULT allows a global definition of the options. They can be overridden rem in each jail afterwards.

I guess this is were Webmin is picking it up from

Regards Jim I had to change # to rem lol

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Submitted by jimr on Sat, 08/13/2016 - 08:25 Pro Licensee

Any news on this as I have another server using webmin that I would like to take to Ubuntu 16.04 from 14.04, I know this is currently running GPL but I will upgrade it to pro on success. I could use the method I used above to upgrade it but the 3 odd hours with the sites off line is not really that good ( a couple are shops)

Sorry, it's not ready quite yet.

If you wanted, you could always do an upgrade of a test system rather than the live one -- and we'd be happy to help you review any issues you run into on that test system.

jimr's picture
Submitted by jimr on Sat, 08/13/2016 - 09:54 Pro Licensee

oddly I have a machine that is sat at ubuntu 12.04 with no lamp stack installed should I install webmin then do the distribution upgrade & report the errors ? Is there a way of directing the output of dist upgrade to a file but still allow the user to answer the questions it asks ? Only difference is this machine is a desktop install not server will this make a difference ?

We definitely recommend testing as much as possible, before making changes to your live server.

My suggestion would be to make that test system as much like your live server as possible, and then try to perform the upgrade on it.

For example, you may want to try importing the backups of domains running on your live server, where you can then test them on the new system. The new Ubuntu is running a much different PHP version, and we've noticed that not all websites work properly with it out of the box. So it might be good to be able to test that out.

Performing an upgrade involves changing a lot of moving parts, and there's definitely an opportunity for downtime. I'd expect a few hours of downtime even during a well-prepared server upgrade.

So yeah try the upgrade on your test server after importing some domains, then try to use those websites, and see if things work as expected.