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On 29 April the new Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Long Term Support) (codename Lucid) will be released. The old LTS 8.04 (codename Hardy) will be maintained for the next 3 years.
The goal is to have all VMs running Lucid by the end of the year. This page will be the place to keep track of progress, features and issues.

It might be worth reinstalling hosts instead of upgrading, because upgrading will keep certain new features from being introduced (GRUB2 bootloader, ext4 filesystems).
Also, the old VMs are created from templates designed two years ago. If we put some effort into a well designed template, newly installed VMs will look very similar, which is good for maintenance.

  • Since we'll be running VMs, the choice will be the server image, then press F4 to select the minimal virtual machine. This will install a slim kernel.
  • Paravirtualisation should be used on all new VMs. Unfortunately this does not work with 64 bit guest. This is not a real problem, because 64 bit guest only are useful when more than 4 GB RAM is used, and currently 1 GB is the highest amount of RAM a VM is configured with.
  • On all hosts that use LDAP authentication nscd will have to be installed (see bug #423252). This might actually be a good idea any way, especially for hosts that need to query LDAP a lot (such as the mailer Erasmus).
  • Open-vm-tools are now 100% usuable, no custom kernel modules are needed. Because the tools make use of the DKMS system, kernel upgrades trigger recompilation of the affected kernel modules, making it it very convenient: 
    apt-get install --no-install-recommends linux-headers-`uname -r` open-vm-dkms open-vm-tools
  • Syslog is replaced with rsyslog. This new logging daemon can also log to MySQL. This needs to be configured.
  • The sun-java6-jre package that used to reside in Hardy's multiverse repository, has been moved to the 'partner' repository (see /etc/apt/sources.list).
  • The hostname that is used during installation will be used to give Logical Volumes names in LVM. Choose a small generic name, so that subsequent clones will not have confusing LVM names.

extra packages from the default install:

vim iptables ipcalc screen ldap-auth-config man nagios-plugins-basic nmap rsync tcpdump wget strace subversion

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