Server Version#: 1.41.7.9717-fa0101728
Server Hardware: Gigabyte H97N-Wifi, i3-4160T 16g RAM, Intel integrated graphics,
Finally found a reason to upgrade from Ubuntu Server 20.04 to 24.04 - to gain some BTRFS performance and tools. I have ESM/Ubuntu-Pro so 20.04 doesn’t become unsupported anytime soon but I think it’s time to move into the 21st century.
I’m just wondering if there are any known issues I need to prepare for. I’ve seen the threads re. hardware encoding and nVidia drivers, neither of which are a factor for me.
My setup is 22tb drive for media, all segregated into various BTRFS subvolumes (movies, music, etc.). The OS runs on an SSD. Everything is on BTRFS file systems. My plan is to snapshot the OS then upgrade to 22.04, reboot and upgrade to 24.04. That way, I can roll back if something breaks.
Thanks for the reply. This is a dedicated server so there isn’t much on it except Plex, NFS, SAMBA, WebMin, ssh, and maybe a couple other things. There’s not even a Desktop Environment. I pretty much manage it through ssh and my desktop file manager via NFS shares.
I like the idea of a package list. I do that when I’m doing a new install rather than a release upgrade. Since I use BTRFS taking a snapshot and the ability to roll-back at least make recovery simple.
I really want to move to 24.04 because there’s some significant upgrades to BTRFS that require a newer kernel series. 20.04 is topped out at 5.15. With 24.04 I can use 6.8 or 6.11. Then I can stay of 24.04 until there’s another need to upgrade. Hopefully, not in my lifetime, LOL.
Ok, I’m back. I started the upgrading this morning. I thought I’d document a few things in case others read this thread. NOTE That I have been using Ubuntu Server 20.04 without a desktop or much else running other than; NFS4, SAMBA, SSH, Plex Server (current) and Webmin.
I started by taking a snapshot of the 20.04 install “just in case.” The upgrade to 22.04 went fairly smoothly. I needed to retain a handful of config files, but other than that, not much interaction during the upgrade. The whole process took about a half-hour.
At first reboot into 22.04, NFS shared folders did not mount. The cause turned out to be that the mount options UID= and GID= are no longer usable with BTRFS. At this point, I’m not sure they are needed anymore so the jury is out on whether or not removing those options will have any effect. A couple updates and reboots and everything seems OK.
Plex seems to be fine as well. I did have to re-log in the web page on the desktop but that would be normal since Plex was down for quite awhile.
Once I was sure 22.04 was OK, I reconfigured GRUB to boot directly to it, but I still have the 20.04 install on stand by.
All done. The upgrade from 22.04 to 24.04 was under 30 minutes. For some reason, nfs client mounts were all read-only. I fiddled for a couple hours with mounts and exports to no benefit, then a reboot of the server fixed it. IDK what the problem actually was.
Since my ultimate goal is to improve BTRFS performance, I went ahead and installed the highest available kernel version, 6.11.0-26-generic, as the default kernel was 6.8.0-60-generic. There are some massive BTRFS performance upgrades with kernel 6.16.0 and I wanted to be ready.
I “tidied up” by renaming my booting subvolumes so I can boot to all three Ubuntu versions if needed.
I just discovered SAMBA is not working. Not really a Plex issue, but part of the upgrade so I thought it worth noting.
I went though my smb.conf file on the server and start remarking out changes I had made in the past. Removing these allowed me to access the server via samba again:
