Ubuntu Server 10.04

I recently did an upgrade on an Ubuntu 8.04LTS server to the newer 10.04.1LTS (aka Lucid Lynx) server. The upgrade was fraught with issues from the very start. Below are ones I’ve seen so far.

1. Running the upgrade things seemed to progress normally and after a while of grinding the upgrade process would fail with complaints about openoffice.org-writer2latex.

Could not install the upgrades
Error during commit
'E:Couldn't configure pre-depend jre for openoffice.org-writer2latex, probably a dependency cycle.'
Restoring original system state "

The not entirely intuitive resolution to this problem was to first use the package manager to uninstall openoffice.org-writer2latex and its dependencies and rerun the upgrade. This worked for the most part and, after an error from the postgrey package, the upgrade process would complete.

2. The postgrey upgrade would not work. Sifting through the install output one finds the following errors:

db4.7_upgrade: Program version 4.7 doesn't match environment version 4.6
db4.7_upgrade: DB_ENV->open: DB_VERSION_MISMATCH: Database environment version mismatch

This error is due to the postgrey installation script explicitly calling the Berkeley db4.7_upgrade utility despite the postgrey.db file already being at version 4.8. The workaround, until the script I fixed, is to temporarily rename the files as below:

cd /usr/bin
mv db4.7_upgrade db4.7_upgrade.orig
ln -s db4.8_upgrade db4.7_upgrade
apt-get install postgrey
rm db4.7_upgrade
mv db4.7_upgrade.orig db4.7_upgrade

It is important to head the warning messages from the postgrey install as well. The older version of Ubuntu configured postgrey to listen on port 60000 and the corresponding postfix policy service configuration to send to port 60000. However, this new version of Ubuntu 10.04 sets postgrey to use port 10023 and it is up to the user to manually change the setting in the /etc/postfix/main.cf file from

check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:60000
to
check_policy_service inet:127.0.0.1:10023

3. After restarting the server, I then see the following errors in the mail.log file:

postfix/tlsmgr[31109]: warning: request to update table btree:/var/spool/postfix/smtpd_scache in non-postfix directory /var/spool/postfix

This one is due to a change in who the process runs as resulting in a permissions issue when accessing the /var/spool/postfix directory.

The fix for this is to change the permissions on the /var/spool/postfix directory:
chown postfix /var/spool/postfix

I’m not getting codgerly about Ubuntu 10.04 just because of these few problems. Yes, it took a fair bit of time and it was a pain to figure out what was wrong and get it fixed. But, all things considered, these weren’t really big deals for a new version. No, the reason that I get codgerly about this stuff is that this is the newly released update 10.04.1. It should already have the fixes to all these stupid issues in it. These stupid issues have had bug reports, workarounds and in some cases patches for quite a while. In at least one case, the bug report was from March 2010, five months prior to the 10.04.1 release.
10.04.1 is a maintenance update to the original Ubuntu 10.04LTS release. For it to be released with stupid five month old bugs still outstanding is just ludicrous for a server product and an LTS one to boot.