I was young. Bleeding edge was what i wanted. Little i knew that non-LTS Ubuntu releases become obsolete after 9 months (ref).

After reading a lot about the shell-shock, I tested whether my VPS was vulnerable to it. And it was! It was an Ubuntu Server 13.10.

I thought a simple apt-get update && apt-get upgrade would fix it. But no. The repositories were obsolete. I was getting errors like these:


W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/raring-security/restricted/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.153 80]
W: Failed to fetch http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/raring-security/universe/binary-i386/Packages 404 Not Found [IP: 91.189.88.153 80]
...


Following this guy’s advice on Askubuntu.com was life saving.


$ sudo sed -i -e 's/archive.ubuntu.com\|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
$ sudo apt-get install update-manager-core
$ sudo do-release-upgrade


All seemed to go fine until i got an error saying:

import apt ImportError: No module named apt

More googling led me to this post on stackoverflow. I ran the following command:

$ apt-get install python-apt


do-release-upgrade was able to continue then. After pressing yes to multiple questions, few reboots, my Ubuntu server was finally on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS 😀