Ran into issues upgrading instances of Ubuntu Server 13.10 to 14.04 running on top of XenServer. It was a little frustrating finding a work around but I did find some helpful posts out there of folks who made this happen.

Below is a summary of what I’ve found and how I got my instances upgraded. YMMV.

Make sure you have backups!

1. On the XenServer console edit the file /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/grub/GrubConf.py

cd /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/grub
cp GrubConf.py to GrubConf.py.original
vi +428 GrubConf.py

change

if arg.strip() == "${saved_entry}":

to

if arg.strip() == "${saved_entry}" or if arg.strip() == "${next_entry}":

2. Dist-upgrade the Ubuntu Server 13.10 instance

sudo -s
aptitude update
aptitude dist-upgrade
reboot

3. Install Grub2 on the Ubuntu Server 13.10 instance

sudo -s
aptitude --with-recommends install grub2
reboot

4. Run an unattended release upgrade on the Ubuntu Server 13.10 instance

sudo -s
do-release-upgrade -f DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive
reboot

5. Check that all went well

sudo -s
uname -mrs
lsb_release -a

Notes:

On a couple of my instances there seemed to be some hangs on configuration. When these hangs occoured I sshed into the instance with the hanging process and ran:

ps ax | grep dpkg
kill -9 ######

###### is of course the process id number from the ps command. The upgrade script seem to run on to completion. Just to be sure everything was OK I ran

dpkg --configure -a
reboot

On one of the instances the dpkg –configure -a command couldn’t configure apport. I rebooted the instance and ran:

aptitude update; aptitude dist-upgrade

and all was well.