Upgrade Lucid to Maverick on EC2

So you're running Ubuntu server Lucid on EC2 cloud EBS root, and decide you don't really want to wait till the next LTS release (12.04)! You want to upgrade your server to Maverick, well, wait no further. Here's how to do it

Let's download the list of ec2 images, get a list lucid ebs i386 amis

ec2-describe-images --all > /tmp/ec2-images
$ grep '099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-i386' /tmp/ec2-images

IMAGE ami-714ba518 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-i386-server-20100427.1 099720109477 available public  i386machine aki-754aa41c   ebs paravirtual
IMAGE ami-1234de7b 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-i386-server-20100827 099720109477 available public  i386 machine aki-5037dd39   ebs paravirtual
IMAGE ami-6c06f305 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-i386-server-20100923 099720109477 available public  i386 machine aki-3204f15b   ebs paravirtual
IMAGE ami-480df921 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-i386-server-20101020 099720109477 available public  i386 machine aki-6603f70f   ebs paravirtual
IMAGE ami-a2f405cb 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-lucid-10.04-i386-server-20101228 099720109477 available public  i386 machine aki-3af50453   ebs paravirtual

Start our instance, if you were already running a lucid server, of course you wouldn't have to do that, but for our demo, we'll create a lucid instance to upgrade it to maverick

$ ec2-run-instances ami-a2f405cb --instance-type t1.micro -k default
RESERVATION r-33271c59 553172479171 default
INSTANCE i-05cd0169 ami-a2f405cb   pending default 0  t1.micro 2011-01-12T20:42:12+0000 us-east-1d aki-3af50453   monitoring-disabled     ebs     paravirtual 
$ ec2-describe-instances | awk '-F\t' '$1 == "INSTANCE" { print $4 }'
ec2-67-202-26-253.compute-1.amazonaws.com

Let's ssh into our to-be-upgraded server, install latest lucid upgrades

ssh ubuntu@ec2-67-202-26-253.compute-1.amazonaws.com
screen -S upgrade

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Normally, you wouldn't be able to update a LTS release, except to another LTS release. We'll change that to upgrade to maverick, and start upgrading

$ sudo sed -i.bak -e 's@lts$@normal@' /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades

$ do-release-upgrade
Checking for a new ubuntu release
Done Upgrade tool signature
Done Upgrade tool
Done downloading
extracting 'maverick.tar.gz'
authenticate 'maverick.tar.gz' against 'maverick.tar.gz.gpg'
tar: Removing leading `/' from member names

Reading cache

Checking package manager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done

Updating repository information
WARNING: Failed to read mirror file
100% [Working]
Checking package manager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Building data structures... Done

Calculating the changes

Calculating the changes

Do you want to start the upgrade?

2 installed packages are no longer supported by Canonical. You can
still get support from the community.

3 packages are going to be removed. 29 new packages are going to be
installed. 274 packages are going to be upgraded.

You have to download a total of 124M. This download will take about
15 minutes with a 1Mbit DSL connection and about 4 hours with a 56k
modem.

Fetching and installing the upgrade can take several hours. Once the
download has finished, the process cannot be cancelled.

Continue [yN]  Details [d]

Agree to any prompts while upgrading, till it actually finishes. Let's not reboot the server, instead we power it off

System upgrade is complete.
Restart required 

To finish the upgrade, a restart is required. 
If you select 'y' the system will be restarted. 

Continue [yN]n
$ sudo poweroff

Now what happened is the server has actually been updated from lucid to maverick. However, Amazon would still boot the server using a lucid kernel. That's because for ec2 the kernel is stored outside of the ebs image itself. However, recently amazon added the ability to use pv-grub for booting, that's basically a way to chainload the kernel from inside the ebs image and boot that. That actually makes the cloud server behave just like a bare metal server, which is always a good thing :) To get the aki ID for the pv-grub kernel, we simply grep for the latest maverick images, since those already have pv-grub attached to them

$ grep '099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-maverick-10.10-i386' /tmp/ec2-images
IMAGE ami-508c7839 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-maverick-10.10-i386-server-20101007.1 099720109477 available public  i386machine aki-407d9529   ebs paravirtual
IMAGE ami-ccf405a5 099720109477/ebs/ubuntu-images/ubuntu-maverick-10.10-i386-server-20101225 099720109477 available public  i386machine aki-407d9529   ebs paravirtual

Now let's switch the upgraded image to use the pv-grub kernel

ec2-modify-instance-attribute i-05cd0169 --kernel aki-407d9529
kernel i-05cd0169 aki-407d9529
$ ec2-start-instances i-05cd0169
INSTANCE i-05cd0169 stopped pending

$ ec2-describe-instances
RESERVATION r-33271c59 553172479171 default
INSTANCE i-05cd0169 ami-a2f405cb ec2-50-16-133-253.compute-1.amazonaws.com ip-10-112-53-225.ec2.internal running default 0  t1.micro 2011-01-12T21:27:51+0000 us-east-1d aki-407d9529   monitoring-disabled 50.16.133.253 10.112.53.225   ebs     paravirtual 
BLOCKDEVICE /dev/sda1 vol-dc7bc9b4 2011-01-12T20:42:22.000Z 

We're done, let's ssh into the new instance, and make sure it's running maverick kernel

ssh ubuntu@ec2-50-16-133-253.compute-1.amazonaws.com
$ uname -r
2.6.35-24-virtual

voila, mission accomplished. Don't forget to terminate your instance

$ ec2-terminate-instances i-05cd0169
INSTANCE i-05cd0169 running shutting-down