We were given a server to play with to do whatever we wanted, hosted in a US data centre. It was running RHEL 4.x, I could have worked with that, but it didn’t look like it was on a support contract, I wasn’t able to update it, anyway.

I thought about trying to convert it to centos, but realised it would be more fun to upgrade it to ubuntu gutsy.

Quick steps from memory

1. swapoff -a
2. mkfs.ext3 /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 (old swap)
3. mount /dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 /mnt
4. wget debootstrap.deb (from gutsy)
5. ar x debootstrap.deb
6. tar -C / -xzf data.tar.gz
7. debootstrap –arch=i386 gutsy /mnt
8. chroot /mnt
9. mount proc, edit /etc/fstab and /etc/network/interfaces
10. apt-get install ubuntu-minimal ubuntu-standard linux-image postfix openssh-server plus a few other packages, some that were recommends.
11. copied gutsy /boot/* to the real /boot and created a new entry in menu.lst
12. created an account and uploaded some ssh keys
13. probably some steps I’ve forgotten
14. reboot

Easy peasy, just waiting for it to come up, it’s been 5 hours now, still waiting. Must be the slowest booting server ever.

Guess I’ll be calling the states now. :’(