So, after ~400 days since installing Ubuntu 8.something, I decided to ugrade using the do-release-upgrade tool. Went fairly simply.. everything seemed to go fine..

..and then, when the upgrade was complete and the server was rebooted...... DEAD.

Logging in through Lish I saw stuff no man should ever have to see. Complete failure of the system trying to mount things. In short, the box was hosed.

After some hunting around, I noticed that the Linode dashboard still had me listed as "My Ubuntu 8.04 LTS Profile". This made me realize that since it's a virtual host, if I just upgrade the disk image itself, there's no way for Linode to know that, and hence the total fubar results.

To fix it, I hit "Deploy Linux Distribution", chose Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, linked it to the previous disk image... hit "boot", crossed my fingers (half expecting to see "Disk Formatted" or something)...

Site was back on its feet. Working beautifully.

I dunno who I should scream at. Linode or Ubuntu. The Ubuntu community should damn well anticipate this and have some sort of warning about virtual hosts. "Warning: This appears to be a Linode. If you run this command, your box will be hosed. Continue?"

I'm just glad I was only down for about an hour. I'm feeling pretty invincible now, total Linux newbie slays the horrifying dragon...

Did you read Linode's documentation on upgrading? If not, that would probably cause your upgrade to fail.

_________________

/* TODO: need to add signature to posts */