In doing some server maintenance, I found I had servers that where on very old versions of Ubuntu. Both where originally Ubuntu 12.10 “Quantal Quetzal” installations. One had somehow been updated to Ubuntu 13.04, but the other was still on 12.10. Here’s the result of lsb_release -a from each machine:
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 13.04
Release: 13.04
Codename: raring
Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 12.10
Release: 12.10
Codename: quantal
The Problem
Running sudo apt-get update resulted in a lot of 404 errors, and trying to upgrade to a newer version always errored out with A problem occurred during the update which apparently comes from the 404’s.
Fixing the Problem
Modify Sources
To fix the problem, I first had to get working package sources. Since the default sources where 404ing, I needed to at least get something working that’d allow me to upgrade.
The initial contents of my /etc/apt/sources.list file is:
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates main
deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-security main
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal universe
deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates universe
Apparently, as these distributions are EOLed, the sources are moved to “old-releases.ubuntu.com”, and the sources.list file needs to be changed to reflect that. Now my sources look like this:
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal main
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates main
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal universe
deb http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu quantal-updates universe
Note, I just removed the “security.ubuntu.com” source since I don’t know what it takes to get that one to work.
Upgrading
To upgrade, I first needed to install the update-manager-core package on one of the two machines. Install it with:
sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
Once installed, begin the upgrade:
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo do-release-upgrade