Upgrading to Ubuntu 22.04 - Jammy Jellyfish!

Hi there! Quick post about Ubuntu 22.04.

I've been running Ubuntu Server on and off for many years now, and have a few Ubuntu 20.04 boxes lying around. I thought I'd "live dangerously" and upgrade them to the still-quite-young Ubuntu 22.04 "Jammy Jellyfish" (if you consider upgrading from one LTS release to another LTS release to be "living dangerously", that is).

Upgrading was as simple as sudo do-release-upgrade -d (Thanks James!), which bypassed the checks that prevent you from upgrading between LTSes before the first point release of the new one. Those checks are a great idea, to be clear - but I'm dealing with a home lab environment and I want the shiny.

The upgrade process recommends not doing the upgrades over SSH, and I'm inclined to agree. Handily, however, even if you don't run the process in screen yourself, it automatically runs the key bits in screen for you. If you do happen to get kicked off or lose your SSH session, logging in (potentially on a second SSH server it helpfully spawns in case the original dies), elevating to root and running screen -rx will get you back to upgrading in no time.

Out of 3 machines I've upgraded so far, two went perfectly... one, not so much.

Some research later, I found that that the error message ("Failed to start default target: Transaction for graphical.target/start is destructive (emergency.target has 'start' job queued, but 'stop' is included in the transaction.") could be filesystem related. I dropped to a terminal and checked /etc/fstab, then noticed this line:

mfsmount /mnt/mfs fuse defaults 0 0

For whatever reason, MooseFS is failing to mount on boot on this machine, causing it to fail to boot properly.

Simply adding nofail resolves the second half of that problem, resulting in a nice happy machine after a reboot;

mfsmount /mnt/mfs fuse defaults,nofail 0 0

And with that, I'm on Ubuntu 22.04 everywhere in my home lab.

This will suffice until 2027, when Ubuntu 22.04 finally goes EOL. Who knows how different the world will look then?

Until next time.