A little while ago I posted about waiting for Ubuntu 10.04 to be released to upgrade our webserver at work to. We were running Ubuntu 7.04 which already wasn’t supported anymore. Due to ClamAV stopping support for the specific ClamAV version on Ubuntu 7.04 we decided not to wait and upgrade as soon as possible. Which was earlier this week.
I had already created a well prepared upgrade procedure, which I finished somewhere in august 2009. Almost 5 months later I was happy to find out that upgrading was still a painless process and all went without problems. As upgrading from 7.04 to 8.04.4 isn’t directly possible I had to upgrade to 7.10 first, which also isn’t supported anymore. Luckily all the packages are still available online. Just not in the official repositories.
The only problem I’ve run into was with Postfix and the IMAP protocol. Some old accounts had their Maildir folder set to the user nobody (which was strangely deleted by the way). For some reason Postfix only accepts it when the group on the folder is users. All Maildir folders for the new(ish) accounts were already owned by the group users and didn’t give me any problems. A quick call chgrp fixed this issue.
Other than that no outstanding issues. So overall I’m VERY HAPPY with how painless upgrading from 7.04 to 8.04.4 was. Of course at the time I was working on my upgrade procedure there were quite some issues, such as HP Tools (hpasm, hpasmcli, hpOpenIPMI) not working. But all were resolved before doing the actual upgrade on the live server. In case of hpasm, in case somebody wonders, you no longer need the hpOpenIPMI driver, as there’s now a open-source driver for it called openipmi. No more recompiling this driver when upgrading the kernel :-).