Resolved What Happened To The Scheduled "Guide" To Ubuntu OS Dist-Upgrade / Obsidian 18.0.31?

[learning_curve]

On one of the many different Plesk pages / articles / forum threads, that discuss Ubuntu OS Dist-Upgrades, Plesk, via this message from Anton Maslov >> Ubuntu 18.04 support in Plesk advised that a "guide" to making a dist-upgrade for Ubuntu OS users, whilst retaining their current Plesk Obsidian setup, would be provided with the release of Obsidian 18.0.31 at the end of October... We can't see it anywhere! Can anyone at Plesk advise what actually happened? Or what will happen instead? Or where it is? - Yes, we could have missed it.... but, pretty sure that other users, would have already commented on using the "guide" by now, if that was the case.

 

[IgorG]

As far as I know, the publication of the instructions has been shifted to the 18.0.32 release.

 

[learning_curve]

Thank you @IgorG Comunication is always very clear from yourself.
Somebody else at Plesk that is involved in this (maybe Anton Maslov again?) should have added an update, so that people were aware of the schedule change.

 

[IgorG]

Somebody else at Plesk that is involved in this (maybe Anton Maslov again?) should have added an update, so that people were aware of the schedule change.

The point is, there is no public schedule that needs to be adjusted.

 

[learning_curve]

The point is, there is no public schedule that needs to be adjusted.

Maybe somebody at Plesk can advise Anton Maslov and/or the team working on that project, of that subtlety, because they've missed it completely...

Without wanting to get too pedantic; This was a schedule & that was provided to the public. If Plesk provide a written schedule, in or on, a general public / open view area, as was the case here, but then, choose to deviate from that schedule, but don't tell anybody that they have deviated from that schedule (unless later on, they ask; what happened?) then that's unhelpful & pretty poor communication too, no matter if it was officially classed as 'public schedule' or not, by Plesk.

"Today's headlines are tomorrow's chip wrappings" etc. It's not worth a big discussion now, so let's see what happens next; when 18.0.32 is released

 

[Martin.B]

I really wonder why it takes so long.
The differences between Ubuntu 16 and 18, and between 18 and 20 are much less significant, than the ones from 14 to 16 (with the whole shift to systemd), and yet they were much quicker to provide a dist-upgrade-path at that time.

 

[IgorG]

I really wonder why it takes so long.

Sorry, but we are not supporters of doing things quickly and poorly.

 

[Dave W]

Pssst @IgorG you might wanna edit that line "we are not supporters of doing things quickly but poorly."

 

[Martin.B]

Sorry, but we are not supporters of doing things quickly and poorly.

Thats ridiculous to say, considering Ubuntu 18 was released 2018 and soon it's 2021.

But the main point of my question was a completely different one: The changes from Ubuntu 14 to Ubuntu 16 were HUGE, yet Plesk managed to provide a great working distupgrade script in time. In comparision the changes from 16 to 18 are peanuts, we are getting closer and closer to the EOL date and yet it seems to take significantly longer. This doesn't seem to make much sense.

 

[IgorG]

I’m glad to inform you that today we finally published dist-upgrade instructions for Plesk Obsidian.
Using this instruction server administrator can perform Operation System upgrade together with Plesk Obsidian.

Supported dist-upgrade paths:

• Debian 9 to Debian 10
• Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 18
• Ubuntu 18 to Ubuntu 20

Note: Debian 8 -> Debian 9 dist-upgrade path is not in the supported list.

Dist-upgrade chapter in Plesk Obsidian documentation: Dist-Upgrade Support

KB article with particular instructions: How to perform dist-upgrade procedure on Linux server with Plesk?

 

[learning_curve]

We couldn't wait that long @IgorG We took the other option ( new server / fresh install of all / migrate old to new / cease old server etc ) but great to see that finally... finally... it's been released by Plesk. Pretty sure that the Ubuntu 16 to Ubuntu 18 will be the most popular & hopefully this will continue now for future Debian and Ubuntu releases too

 

[Martin.B]

Hi,
did anyone here already tried the Dist-Upgrade-Guide successfully?

I wanted to test it on a Ubuntu 18 machine (so Ubutnu 18 → 20), however it didn't quite work. I think the problem was in step 12. The guide states, that a few packages may get uninstalled during this step, however on my system it also uninstalled important plesk packages (like plesk-core and plesk-core-utilities), which also resulted in the plesk database getting wiped from mariadb, and therefore I had to give up.
I closely followed the steps, so I'm not sure what went wrong here.