Ubuntu 16.04 upgrade

This holiday saw me upgrade a home server from Ubuntu 14.04 to 16.04. I completed a similar upgrade on another machine recently, but this one has an ‘occasional use’ desktop GUI. The thing that I needed to bear in mind is that Ubuntu 16.04 (like Centos 7 and above) uses systemd instead of System V init or upstart, which affects numerous things (like logging, service restart, etc).

I find that staying behind the curve for upgrades, particularly where it is a must work machine, saves a fair amount of grief. Although I invariably have to track down problems, by the time I get around to an upgrade there tend to be other people who have found (and worked-around) similar issues. This means I can cherry-pick the preferred fix (rather than having to use the horrible hack someone has documented, or track down the real problem/fix).

During this upgrade, after rebooting the screen remained blank. After finding the machine was actually on the network, I tracked it down to this problem:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/792129/16-04-boot-stops-at-a-start-job-is-running-for-hold-until-boot-process-finish

Switching from the gdm3 desktop manager to lightdm fixed this issue; X usage is minimal so features are of minimal interest, as long as it works!

To get x11vnc (the common/standard desktop-agnostic Ubuntu VNC server for X) to start in 16.04 (and later), with systemd, you need the following:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/VNC/Servers#Have_x11vnc_start_automatically_via_systemd_in_any_environment_.28Vivid.2B-.29

Following the instructions does not seem to cause VNC to start. There must be a better way, but the brute-force reboot caused
it to start a process on port 5900.

The side effect of switching away from gdm3 is that my VNC server configuration no longer functions … more work to do! By way of a reminder, the reason for VNC server is so that the user can connect to do admin tasks without having to physically connect KVM (keyboard/video/mouse) to the server. As OSX is the usual client, integration using Zeroconf (Avahi) makes a lot of difference!

To get Avahi notifying about the service, add the below config to a file (eg, rfb.service) to the /etc/avahi/services/ directory:

———-
<?xml version=”1.0″ standalone=’no’?><!–*-nxml-*–>
<!DOCTYPE service-group SYSTEM “avahi-service.dtd”>
<service-group>
<name replace-wildcards=”yes”>%h</name>
<service>
<type>_rfb._tcp</type>
<port>5900</port>
</service>
</service-group>

The above was shamelessly taken from holyarmy.org – why re-invent the wheel?

Let’s hope that other things haven’t boken, although TimeMachine integration breakage tends to happen on OSX upgrades!

Tags: , , ,

Comments are closed.