Upgrading an End-of-Life Ubuntu Server

I was recently tasked with updating a handful of Ubuntu 15.04 “Vivid” servers to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS “Xenial”. At first this seemed pretty easy, but I quickly realised that Ubuntu 15.04 reached it’s end of life in February 2016… and I was attempting to perform this upgrade in January 2020. Let the fun times roll!

When I initially ran sudo apt-get update, I noticed that there were a lot of 404 Not Found errors:

$ sudo apt-get update

Err http://security.ubuntu.com vivid-security/main Sources
  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.15 80]
Err http://security.ubuntu.com vivid-security/universe Sources
  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.15 80]
Err http://security.ubuntu.com vivid-security/main amd64 Packages
  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.15 80]
Ign http://archive.ubuntu.com vivid-updates/main amd64 Packages/DiffIndex
Err http://security.ubuntu.com vivid-security/universe amd64 Packages
  404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.91.15 80]

After visiting the Ubuntu distribution lists http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists I noticed that all Vivid packages have been removed, while current supporting images, such as Trusty, Xenial and Bionic remained. This was also confirmed by visiting the Ubuntu release website which indicated which releases were supported and which were not.

After trailing through a few forums, I discovered that rather than removing the older packages from the Ubuntu distribution, they are archived as “Old Releases” here: http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/. This archive list is essentially a list of unsupported and insecure packages.

In order to make apt-get update work, a small updated within the /etc/apt/sources.list is required. Essentially all references to security.ubuntu.com and archive.ubuntu.com should be altered to old-releases.ubuntu.com, as per the following sed command:

$ sudo sed -i.bak -r 's/(archive|security).ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Once completed, running sudo apt-get update seems to complete without any problems.

I then proceeded to perform the release upgrade using the do-release-upgrade command, but experienced another error:

$ sudo do-release-upgrade
Reading cache

Checking package manager

Cannot upgrade

An upgrade from 'vivid' to 'xenial' is not supported with this tool.
=== Command terminated with exit status 1 ===

The do-release-upgrade command only supports upgrading to the next Ubuntu version, but as the current server is not on the latest version of 15 (15.10 is the latest), the do-release-upgrade command refuses to perform the upgrade. To solve this problem, I needed to upgrade to 15.10 - this was also an end-of-life operating system!

Firstly, I modified /etc/apt/sources.list again, swapping out all references to vivid to wily (15.10):

$ sudo sed -i.bak -r 's/vivid/wily/g' /etc/apt/sources.list

Once completed, I removed any cached packages and updated the latest packages with the following commands:

$ sudo apt-get clean
$ sudo apt-get update

Now I can upgrade from Ubuntu 15.04 to Ubuntu 15.10 with:

$ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

After 10 minutes and a reboot, I was now running Ubuntu 15.10. This is progress, but I wasn’t at the end goal of having an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS install. Luckily the do-release-upgrade command supports upgrading from Ubuntu 15.10 to Ubuntu 16.04, so the upgrade was a simple as:

$ sudo do-release-upgrade

After another 10 minutes and another reboot, I was now running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS - a great success!