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Published by Jordon Bedwell

Just an update: Slicehost does now have the option to redo your slice in Hardy Heron. For those of you who just like to start from scratch and create more downtime for yourself, here is the link confirming that that they do have it.

With the release of Hardy Heron today, it’s time I sit down and explain to people how to upgrade to Hardy before Slicehost has released an official image. This will also save you the time of having to backup all your files so you can “put them back up” after you’ve moved over. I mean, lets get this right, do you really want to have to take down your server just to put it back up when you can do it all with only 5 minutes of total downtime? So what do we need?

1. PuttySSH if you’re on Windows, Terminal otherwise.
2. Patience and a set of balls (this is not a literal pair of balls)
3. Ubuntu - yeah, I’ve seen people confuse Ubuntu and Debian 0.o
4. I enabled the backups for today and today only at a pro-rated price.

The reason I said make an image of your slice is simply because, if you mess something up, you’ll need to rollback as quick as possible, this is your life saver and it NEEDs to be done, it’s administration 101, backups backups backups. Fail to make a backup, and you fail at being an interweb savvy person.

So, lets go ahead and login to Putty or Terminal. For those of you on Linux and Mac, I’ll show you what to do from terminal. From Windows and Putty, it’s self explanatory and visual.

So, now that we’re inside of terminal, we need to make sure we are prepared for the upgrade, lets upgrade some components to make sure we are going to have a smooth transition between the two. Lets perform a few commands to ensure this. First we will do an update on the repos, then we will do an upgrade on the software on the server from the current repos.

Some of you may be asking why I did sudo on all the commands even though I was logged in as root. The simple answer is: because it’s good practice to get used to doing sudo silly. I also performed a clean up so that we could remove old files.

Now that we have completed the upgrade on the current distro, lets go ahead and restart so that we can do anything else that needs to be done, you know, the stuff that would require an awesome restart. I know :( a whole 30 seconds while it reboots, it’s gonna destroy us.

Now that we have restarted, updated and upgraded, we can get onto the good stuff. First off, let us imply that this is going from Gutsy to Hardy, if you would like to go from Feisty to Hardy, I would recommend that you go ahead and move to Feisty first then to Hardy, that way you have a smoother transition. Nobody wants to spend wasted time and man-hours fixing problems that SHOULDN’T exist because people like to cut corners. So lets start pumping out the commands:

Now it should start upgrading everything, if it asks you what you want to do with configuration files, keep your old ones if you’ve done any customisations to the server, if you haven’t and you are at default everything, bad you, but go ahead and replace them so if you read any tutorials on the new versions, you don’t have any issues.

After everything is done, we need to make sure everything is working right, so before we restart, we will go ahead and backtrack apt. We do the usual when we want to backtrack and check. After we do that, we need to reconfigure packages, and then go ahead and restart.

Congratulations, you should officially be on the newest version of Ubuntu (Hardy Heron), enjoy and take the time to download it to your PC so you can see the new visual side of things. If you want to double check and confirm you are on Hardy Heron, do the following command:

Enjoy the new PHP, MySQL, Lighttpd, Apache and other packages, remember, if you have PHP without some of the security add-ons, it will add them, don’t worry though, it shouldn’t effect you and if it does, you can always remove the module.

Just an update: Slicehost does now have the option to redo your slice in Hardy Heron. For those of you who just like to start from scratch and create more downtime for yourself, here is the link confirming that that they do have it.

For those of you who are wondering, yes, this tutorial will work for Debian, just substitute Feisty, Gutsy, Hardy with the version names of Debian. Sarge, Lenny, Etch. Remember, Debian doesn’t have LTS and Short-Term, they have a set development schedule that lasts longer then Ubuntu in most cases. Lenny has not been officially released and is considered and unstable operating system.

Apr 24, 2008
Filed under: Tutorials, hardy heron, ubuntu