Upgrading to Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Ubuntu 20.04 is the latest LTS version and fully is fully compatible with ServerWand.

You will need to upgrade via the command line and preferably using KVM in case you get disconnected.

If using Linode, you can connect to your server using the Lish console found in the Linode control panel.

In order to upgrade from Ubuntu 18.04, you must make sure your distro is up-to-date by entering:

sudo apt update && sudo apt dist-upgrade

Once your system has been updated, it will likely need a reboot.

sudo reboot

When it comes back up you can start the upgrade:

sudo do-release-upgrade

The installation process will start and you will be asked several questions. The default answers are usually correct.

On a couple of servers, it failed to upgrade the PhpMyAdmin database so I chose to ignore it and installed ok anyway.

The whole process takes around 20mins.

Once complete the system will prompt you to reboot again, after which you will be good to go.

The server summary page in ServerWand will reflect the new OS version.

Potential hazards

Some issues you may encounter with this release.

PHP short tags such as:

<?

will need to be replaced with:

<?php

Or you can enable short tags in ServerWand by clicking the PHP configure button on the server summary page and entering:

short_open_tag=On

Note that this is a short term solution as PHP short tags are removed completely in PHP 8 which will be the default version in Ubuntu 22.04 LTS.

MariaDB rules are stricter which can lead to errors such as "Fatal Error: Field 'foo' doesn't have a default value "

This is because STRICT_TRANS_TABLES is enabled by default.

You can disable strict mode in ServerWand by clicking the MariaDB configure button on the server summary page and entering:

[mysqld]
sql_mode=""

IMAP connection issues

If users are unable to connect to IMAP accounts check for the following errors in Journal.

dovecot: imap-login: Error: Failed to initialize SSL server context..

In order to fix this, edit the dovecot config file:

sudo nano /etc/dovecot/conf.d/10-ssl.conf

Add the line:

ssl_dh = </usr/share/dovecot/dh.pem

Exit and save using Ctrl-o followed by Ctrl-x

Restart dovecot

sudo service dovecot restart

The problem should now be fixed.