Ubuntu old school

So I run into this old server and I realize it had DAPPER on it still! After running updates I just can’t take it any longer. I try the update-manager upgrade method and then I remember (with help of google) that this didn’t always work for dapper->edgy. So I vim “:%s/dapper/edgy/g” the sources.list file and apt-get update && apt-get -f dist-upgrade

Luckily this thing is only a server and so I only get this prompt:

787 upgraded, 148 newly installed, 58 to remove and 31 not upgraded.
Need to get 469MB of archives.

Over a lowly T1 its only estimating 45 minutes. Not bad. *sigh* Then I’ll have to go edgy->feisty and next week I’ll probably find myself moving it to gutsy.

No power in the nets can stop me.

This customer of mine gets Internet access through their building. It is nice for them because they are a tiny company and don’t have time or money to run much of their own network. Unfortunately, doing this Ubuntu upgrade for them was not trivial. They have a WatchGuard firewall which is configured pretty dumb. When I try to apt-get upgrade, I get a failure.

Apt-get didn’t give me much detail other than a failure message, but trying to access a deb in my browser gives good information:

Response denied by […] WatchGuard Firewall HTTP proxy.

…

Reason: header ‘Content-Type’ denied rule=’Default’ value=’application/x-debian-package’

WOW! Debian denied!

This was easy enough to work around by using proxies. Thank goodness apt supports http_proxy. But thank a friend even more for a favor so that I could proxy through a faster connection and max out the customers T1 rather than proxy through my cable modem and only get cable modem outbound speeds. 180kB > 40kB