Short post about fixing a failed ubuntu upgrade

content/posts/recovering-failed-ubuntu-upgrade.md

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+---
+title: 'Recovering Failed Ubuntu Upgrade'
+date: 2024-10-07T22:59:30Z
+draft: false
+series: "Fun Center"
+summary: "Marcus recovers from an aborted Ubuntu Upgrade on his VPS"
+tags:
+- ubuntu
+- how-i-did-it
+- technology
+---
+
+Forewarning- I tried to ask ChatGPT to help me with this post but it didnt understand and kept misbehaving so I had to forego that for this post.  Also I dont normally write about techy stuff so I hope I got it all in the right order. 
+
+I use a VPS I got on a black friday sale from [Rack Nerd](https://www.racknerd.com/) and it has been solid for uptime and everything.  I run my a few servers up there including my atuin, ntfy, a budgeting app, and some other random one off stuff. I run the nextcloud and other larger storage things at home thanks to Google Fiber/WebPass.
+
+Most of the time I use it as a jump server to connect over to SDF or to wherever else online I'm going and so I dont see my MOTD. A few weekends back I was setting up an [Actual Server](https://actualbudget.org/) aka the budgeting app and I saw that I was out of date and Ubuntu 24.01 was avaialble. Because I'm so good at planning I started up the upgrade and then saw I needed to get to the movies. I hit control c and closed the window. Don't do that! 
+
+So I left everything running for a month or so and decided today I would get it going.  First I tried the simple 
+`sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade` 
+Update was happy but upgrade was mad. It suggested maybe I should run `sudo apt --fix-broken install` which then also told me to try `sudo apt-get clean` from there I was off to startpage to see if I could find something.  I tried `sudo dpkg --configure -a` and I tried `sudo apt upgrade --fix-missing` and `do apt-get -f install` at this point I was starting to get a little desperate. How desperate? Messing with some system level files desperate! 
+
+I found a Stack Overflow question and the answers suggested moving the dat files from /var/cache/debconf to a backup directory and then trying to upgrade again.  That failed but told me that everything failed because it depended on systemd-sysv. Oooh progress! 
+
+At this point when I ran the apt update and then apt upgrade I got a warning about the shadow group cdrom already existing. so I edited the /etc/gshadow file to remove it. Then it was another group. I noticed that they were all groups that had ubuntuf in the last field. I put the cdrom entry back, duplicated the file, and then deleted all the ubuntufs in there. Then I ran `sudo dpkg --configure -a` Hey it finished! 
+
+```
+Do you want to continue? [Y/n] y
+(Reading database ... 147882 files and directories currently installed.)
+Preparing to unpack .../systemd-sysv_255.4-1ubuntu8.4_amd64.deb ...
+Unpacking systemd-sysv (255.4-1ubuntu8.4) over (249.11-0ubuntu3.12) ...
+Setting up systemd-sysv (255.4-1ubuntu8.4) ...
+Processing triggers for man-db (2.10.2-1) ...
+needrestart is being skipped since dpkg has failed
+```
+
+I switched over to root to run these because I was done typing sudo sudo sudo so much
+
+Let's try the apt update .. so far so good
+
+Lets try upgrade .. no not quite there yet
+
+Ok how about `apt --fix-broken install` 
+
+Wooo it was installing like crazy. 
+
+It wasn't quite done though. I ran apt update and we still had quite a few packages to work on. 
+
+One more apt upgrade and then it was time to restart. 
+
+After reboot we were on 24.01. Now I need to upgrade postgresql eventually...