Ubuntu Release Upgrade

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1

I’m just starting using Ansible a few weeks ago. Using:
ansible 1.4 (devel a002a24973) last updated 2013/09/25 17:14:03 (GMT -700)

Currently, I’m using it with Vagrant, VirtualBox with Ansible as a provisioner to build a clustered Varnish test suite. It works awesome.

In our dev/qa/production environments we’ve been running Varnish on Ubuntu Lucid. I’d like to upgrade to Precise. Time to upgrade. I thought this might be good test for Ansible. I’ve downloaded the standard lucid64 box and created a simple playbook:

  • name: Update apt cache
    action: apt update_cache=true
    tags: ubuntu_upgrade

  • name: Distribution Upgrade {{dist_upgrade}}
    apt: pkg=update-manager-core state=latest
    when: ${dist_upgrade}
    register: upgrade
    tags: ubuntu_upgrade

  • name: Do Release Upgrade
    command: /usr/bin/do-release-upgrade -f DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive
    when: (upgrade|success) and (${dist_upgrade})
    tags: ubuntu_upgrade

When I run the playbook, the do-release fails task fails and Ansible hangs. I thought at some point it may timeout or someting but I let in run all night and the console indicated it was still working on the task.

When I log into the machines while the tasks are executing. It seems to start off okay on one machine but after a few minutes activity on the box decreases to an idle state. One thing I noticed is a precise process that has gone into a zombie state. The task does not kick off on the other box.

I am curious if anyone might be able to shed some light on doing a release upgrade on Ubuntu using Ansible.

If I ssh into the guest machine I can run it manually.

Cheers,
Paul

2

I would probably consider async mode (see docs on async), though I would expect you to encounter an SSH timeout. It is probably that this command is not daemonizing correctly.

I should point out your use of legacy variables is discouraged:

when: (upgrade|success) and (${dist_upgrade})

Can be written as:

when: (upgrade|success) and dist_upgrade

Similarly:

when: ${dist_upgrade}

Should be:

when: dist_upgrade

3

do-release-upgrade is slow… can take from 1 - 2 hours to complete depending on your internet speeds.

Have you checked the screen that it creates during the processing when you think it is idling ?

do a:
sudo screen -list

It should list the one running there with something like this:

There is a screen on:
2953.ubuntu-release-upgrade-screen-window (09/13/2012 04:48:02 AM) (Detached)
1 Socket in /var/run/screen/S-root.

Then you can run:

sudo screen -d -r root/2953.ubuntu-release-upgrade-screen-window

I’m not 100% sure that screen gets run when you do a DistUpgradeViewNonInteractive… but have a look…

I would suggest running this command without waiting for it in a shell script or something like that, so Ansible doesn’t wait forever/until SSH times out. As this can’t really be timed or checked if succeeded before the machine have rebooted and you see a new distro version.

4

Ansible has an async option that can be used to poll on long running tasks, BTW.

5

Nice I didn’t even notice that.

What would happen if the box restarts though ? (Which happens after do-release-upgrade is done)

6

At least one can run it with poll 0, but would be cool if it can still run after reboot to continue doing a play.