My upgrade from Ubuntu 6.06 LTS = FAIL.
Last week I created a VPS on Slicehost. I’ve been using Tektonic for a while now and have no complaints. The support is very good and I can backup my VPS for when I need to.
I’m using Slicehost because I don’t want both of my domain DNS servers on the same provider. They offer Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, runs on top of Xen, and provide console access via an Ajax web front end. You need to pay extra for a backup option. Aside from that one little point, using Slicehost is ridiculously easy and very manageable. They eat their own dog food and it shows.
On my Tektonic VPS it’s running on top of Virtuozzo. No console just ssh but I do get to make a backup of my VPS and re-installing is a breeze. My only complaint is that it’s running Ubuntu 6.06 LTS which is a little dated. For example the subversion client is 1.3.2 and I’d like to see more current versions such as 1.5.x. On Ubuntu 8.04 LTS I just added the backports repository and I get current versions of packages.
Switching to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should be simple. As root I ran these commands:
apt-get update apt-get upgrade apt-get install update-manager-core do-release-upgrade
This is a seamless process and aside from asking me some questions, I had no issues. The only issue I had is when I rebooted my VPS, it left the VPS un-bootable. The support tech that I chatted with had not seen that before. My VPS would not even start and I had to re-install it.
I’m now restoring the VPS to the backup I made yesterday, so it’s not all a total wash. Most likely I’ll work with Tektonic to get 8.04 LTS on that slice provided they offer it. Ubuntu 6.06 LTS is still supported so aside from consistency across servers, this is not a big deal for me.
Mario says:
Hello Jan,
Did you get this issue resolved meanwhile? I have just tried to upgrade to 8.04 on a Hosteurope vserver that also is Virtuozzo based and failed again. Same problem: No reboot, the logfiles (in repair mode) show no problems.
November 23, 2008 — 4:39 pm
Jan Dembowski says:
Hello Mario,
I’m afraid not. Since I’m getting support (patches, security updates, etc.) it’s not annoying enough for me to get working.
It is odd that Virtouzzo does the same thing for both of us. Good luck getting 8.04 on your VPS.
Jan Dembowski
November 23, 2008 — 5:35 pm
Mario says:
After wrecking the machine the second time I contacted support and they told me that 8.04 is not yet supported by Virtuozzo. Too bad, now I’ll have a harder time getting Rails 2.0.2 to run.
November 24, 2008 — 3:26 pm