[ubuntu-cloud] Ubuntu Server 11.04 archive end-of-life

[Ben Howard]

Ubuntu Server 11.04 has proven to be a venerable server platform, it has
nonetheless, reached its end of life on October 28, 2012. Whether or not
you are blissfully unaware, end-of-life means that updates and security
patches have been discontinued.

As part of the EOL'ing of a release, the mirrors are retired over time.
Last week the mirrors for 11.04 were retired from archive.ubuntu.com,
which in turn propagated through to the S3 EC2 mirrors. Any person using
Ubuntu 11.04 and the S3 mirrors or archive.ubuntu.com will be unable to
install software.

Over the last week, the Cloud Image team has fielded several questions
from distraught users caused by the continued use of 11.04. We strongly
suggest that those running Ubuntu Server 11.04 and the recently expired
11.10 and 8.04 LTS upgrade to a supported release to prevent any
disruptions to their infrastructure. The current supported LTS is 12.04
with 13.04 being the latest stable release. Ubuntu 10.04 LTS is
supported until April of 2015.

Those who continue to run expired Ubuntu releases may experience issues
and may be required to mitigate the movement of mirrors from the S3 and
main archive servers to old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu [2]. While Ubuntu
8.04 LTS and 11.10 are currently available at the main archive and S3
locations, they will be removed anytime, per policy [3]
The Symptom

For those who are still running 11.04 and are running the 11.04 Cloud
Image, you mostly likely have encountered or will encounter some ugly
error messages when you try to access the S3 archives for EC2 images in
the form of 404 and 403 errors. For example:

    Err http://security.ubuntu.com natty-security/main Sources
      404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
    Err http://security.ubuntu.com natty-security/universe Sources
      404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
    Err http://security.ubuntu.com natty-security/main amd64 Packages
      404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
    Err http://security.ubuntu.com natty-security/universe amd64 Packages
      404  Not Found [IP: 91.189.92.201 80]
    Ign http://security.ubuntu.com natty-security/main Translation-en_US

And....

    Err http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
natty-updates/main libapr1 amd64 1.4.2-7ubuntu2.1
      403  Forbidden
    Err http://us-east-1.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ natty/main
libaprutil1 amd64 1.3.9+dfsg-5ubuntu3
      403  Forbidden

The reason for this is that when the archives were expired the S3
mirrors themselves replicated the expiration. This is a friendly way to
let you know that you should upgrade [3]  to the Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS.

If, however, you are unable to upgrade, there are two options.
Fix Option 1:

    sudo sed -i 's,http://.*ubuntu.com,http://old-releases.ubuntu.com,g'
/etc/apt/sources.list
    sudo apt-get -y update

If you intend on rebundling the image, you will need to run the
following commands to ensure that bundled images retain the settings:

    dpkg-divert --local --rename --add
/etc/cloud/templates/sources.list.tmpl
    sed -i  's,http://.*ubuntu.com,http://old-releases.ubuntu.com,g' \
         /etc/cloud/templates/sources.list.tmpl.distrib \
        | sudo tee /etc/cloud/templates/sources.list.tmpl

Fix Option 2: Starting new instances

If you are starting a new instance, you can configure your cloud-config
to default to the new mirrors. The relevent option is the

    #cloud-config
    bootcmd:
    - sed -i 's,\$mirror,http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu,g' -e
's,http://security.ubuntu.com.,http://old-releases.ubuntu.com,g'
/etc/cloud/templates   /sources.list.tmpl.distrib >
/etc/cloud/templates/sources.list.tmpl

References

[1]
http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2012/10/28/ubuntu-11-04-natty-narwhal-end-of-life-reached-on-october-28-2012/

[2] http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/
[3] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/PreciseUpgrades

-- 


Ben Howard
ben.howard at canonical.com
Canonical
GPG ID 0x5406A866



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