Focal

Preamble

Until recently, I worked for Canonical on the Snap Advocacy Team. Some of the things in this blog post may have changed or been fixed since I left. It’s quite a long post, but I feel it’s neccessary to explain fully the status-quo. This isn’t intended to be a “hit piece” on my previous employer, but merely information sharing for those looking to control their own systems.

I’ve previously provided feedback in my previous role as Snap Advocate, to enable them to better control updates. However, a lot of this feedback was spread over forum threads and other online conversations. So I thought I’d put together some mitigations and the steps I take in one place.

Yesterday I wrote about my attempt to upgrade one of my HP Microservers, running Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. Well, today I had another go. Here’s what happened.

I followed the recommendation from yesterday, to compress the initrd.img using xz compression rather than the previous default gzip. Previously the upgrade failed because it needed 140M disk space in /boot. With the change to the compression scheme, I now have 154M, which should be enough to start the upgrade.

I have a few old and crusty HP MicroServers in the loft at home. I started out with one when HP did a cashback offer, making them very affordable. Over time I’ve acquired a couple more. One, named colossus is running rsnapshot to provide backups of my other machines. Another, called shirka is a Plex Media Server and the last, robby is a general purpose box running various jobs and reports. All run Ubuntu Server as the OS.