Preparing For Ubuntu 14.04
Overview
With Ubuntu 14.04 LTS coming up I thought it would be fitting to discuss my plans for upgrading. My current setup has 1 computer running 12.04 LTS and it has been running relatively well except for the first few months and one or two kernel patches which broke something.
Prerequisite
This time round there are no hardware changes and the box will be used. I always prefer doing a fresh install because I have the home directory mapped to a separate drive from the OS. The only thing which needs to be taken off is the MySQL database data but this is backed up on a regular basis. Other services such as DLNA server, Web server configuration and data files, etc.
Another thing to note is the user profiles. They have stuck around for a while because the home drive is mounted on a separate disk. This time I would like to replace them with the default files and adding the missing things like bashrc.
Plan
The plan is to run a virtual machine with Ubuntu on to make sure the OS has what it has currently. This will serve as a light test to ensure things like the DLNA servers work. 12.04 introduced issues with Asterisk so my PBX system didn’t work (thankfully FreePBX came along).
As usual before attempting anything like this is to backup the system. I want to clone the disks this time to an external drive. This way if there were issues bedding in with the new version, a restore of the clone should bring the system back to as it was. One advantage of cloning is the images can be split so that the backup disk does not need to be the same size as the storage it’s cloning.
Once complete, an install of the new OS, backup the profiles and use the new default ones and mount the other drives accordingly.
Summary
A clone should make it easier to restore back to it’s original state. It’s also a good time to possibly test a full restore of backups as well.
