October 30th, 2009

Ubuntu Karmic Koala Available

Wow. We've had a mad 24 hours but we are very pleased to announce we have a shiny new Ubuntu Karmic Koala Slice image up and running.

If you want to try it, then log into the (Slicemanager) and fire up a new Slice or you could rebuild your current Slice with a fresh Koala image (remember a rebuild will wipe the Slice though!).

The kernel issues we talked about yesterday have been solved by the wonderful Systems Team. If you happen to be in our IRC lounge (Freenode, #slicehost) then do send a wave of thanks to RackerHacker and Ant. They have worked their little socks off on this one and have done a great job.

I think you know we don't recommend upgrading a distro from the command line but, hey, if you want to, then the latest kernel will allow you to do just that.

For those that do decide to go the command line route, then you will want to upgrade the kernel, via the Slicemanager, before you upgrade the distro. Good luck!

Thanks for your patience and support while we sorted out the kernel issues. It goes without saying (although I'll just go ahead and say it anyway) that if you have any issues then let us know. The best ways of getting in touch are to open a ticket via the Slicemanager or to join us in our chatroom 24/7.

Cheers, Paul

8 Comments

  1. Great! Thanks for the tip re: the unsupported command line upgrade process—didn’t know about that.

  2. excellent work. the new kernel brought my botched commandline upgrade back to life and saved my neck :)

  3. Haha, yeah I did a command line upgrade from Intrepid -> Jaunty -> Karmic the other week. And of course it wouldn’t boot, so I restored to my Jaunty backup….which I guess I made after I set it up to upgrade to Karmic. I had to end up rolling back to my Intrepid upgrade, and re-running the Jaunty upgrade (all from command-line – because I didn’t want to deal with the ‘headache’ of transferring everything over ;). All of this was to get Mono working on my box…which it turns out, wasn’t working because of a kernel bug (and I upgraded to Karmic thinking that would fix my issue – before I knew that it was a bug with the Kernel).

    Eventually I came upon a thread on the SH forums which appeared to solve my issue….’Just change the kernel’ it said, and it worked.

    Bottom line: if something breaks, make sure you have a backup. It’s worth the $5 a month for their backup program, and you get 3!

  4. Just FYI – if you were like me and stupidly upgraded your slice to Karmic before reading the FAQ’s here – all may not be lost!

    I too was unable to reboot after the command line upgrade, but I installed the new kernel (that would be 2.6.31-302-rs to reduce confusion) and my slice booted up just fine, no file loss at all.

    WHEW!

    HTH

  5. some what scary it made :D

  6. I was able to upgrade two servers via command-line without any major issues. The one issue I encountered was on my web server which is running the latest versions of nginx and php_fpm.

    The php process wouldn’t start because libltdl.so.3 could not be found. libltdl.so.7 was installed so I created a symbolic link for libltdl.so.3>libltdl.so.7 and everything is running smoothly.

  7. That new kernal upgrade saved my system. I upgraded via command and like you said it would not boot.

    So I logged into the slicemanager and upgraded the kernel.

    Geez, scary, thought I would have to rebuild my server.. THANK YOU

  8. Oh god I’m an idiot. I just did the same thing and borked my box. I’ve really gotta read this stuff before upgrading. Never had an issue before now! Thank you SO MUCH for posting this. I was damn near weeping. Methinks it’s time to buy backups.

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