If you’re also thinking about doing a dist-upgrade of your Ubuntu VPS over at Hosteurope (from 6.06 LTS to 8.04 LTS), don’t dare. I just got off the phone with a technical assistant from Hosteurope, who confirmed that, at the moment, it is not possible to upgrade the system since that may very well cause problems with their virtualization software (I think Parallels Virtuozzo). So I guess I won’t risk it Well, I couldn’t resist And it seems to have worked by doing the following. Before I start, I should mention that I’m running Hosteurope’s “Virtual Server Linux L 3.0″ WITHOUT Plesk installed. Also I didn’t do the update using the new “update-manager”, but went the old fashioned way instead. So here it goes:

• just in case anything goes wrong, you might wanna do a full backup via the Virtuozzo panel
• do a full apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade
• edit the /etc/apt/sources.list (after backupping the file) and change everything from “dapper” to “hardy”, so that e.g. “deb ftp://ftp.hosteurope.de/mirror/archive.ubuntu.com/ dapper main multiverse universe” becomes “deb ftp://ftp.hosteurope.de/mirror/archive.ubuntu.com/ hardy main multiverse universe”
• Now do another apt-get update, hold your breath and type apt-get dist-upgrade
• This should run you through the upgrade process. I did not care too much about new .conf files, which is why I answered (I think) all questions about keeping or installing new files with “No”
• That’s almost it

During the installation procedure you might encounter a line where the system tries to restart the kernel log daemon (klogd) and fails in doing so. This may very well be the reason (and I’m not betting any money on this) why many people report they were unable to reboot their servers after doing the update and in the end had to re-install the system. To enable klogd to start, go to /etc/default/klogd and remove the # from the following line: #KLOGD="-P /var/run/klogd/kmsg -x" (Thanks to Anreas for the hint!)

Now you should be able to reboot your system.

Tags: 6.06, 8.04, dist-upgrade, hosteurope, linux, lts, server, ubuntu, update, upgrade

Posted by admin on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 5:34 pm.