Grappling with the Groovy Gorilla

closeHey, just so you know ... this post is now about 3 years and 5 months old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

It’s late October which means (I’ve been working from home for seven months! and) it’s time for the latest Ubuntu release, 20.10 (Groovy Gorilla).

But first, another fall sports re-cap. What a 2020 it’s been for my teams! First the Lightning win the Stanley Cup for the second time in franchise history, and now the Rays are in their second World Series, down 2 games to 1 against the LA Dodgers. The Bucs, with Tom Brady at the helm, are on top of the NFC South with a 4-2 record. Could a trip to the Super Bowl (here in Tampa, probably in March?) be in the cards to complete the trifecta? I don’t follow soccer, but even the Rowdies are one win away from the USL Championship! What’s up with Florida sports right now? The Indians exited the playoffs quickly, swept out by the Yankees, but even the Browns currently have a winning record at 4-2 (their best start since Bill Belichick was head coach)!

COVID-19 is still with us (I naively said the world would be back to normal by the time this Ubuntu release was out) so maybe I need to include that in my bi-annual updates.

Ok, back to the upgrade.

do-release-upgrade ran fine this time, no premature exits or errors. Once that was complete (about 20 minutes), I re-applied the customizations to my affected configuration files (3 total) and rebooted. That’s where the grappling began:

  • No internet connection: the local network was fine (I was able to SSH in), but couldn’t ping/resolve anything external. I eventually tracked this down to an issue with resolv.conf, which only had an entry for 127.0.0.53 (which is supposed to be the local resolved daemon). I had to add my Pi-Hole’s address to /etc/resolvconf/resolv.conf.d/original and that resolved the DNS problem.
  • Apache wouldn’t start: this turned out to be due to a missing module (mod_wsgi) that I was referencing in one of my config files for Adagios. I used apt-get to install libapache2-mod-wsgi-py3 which let Apache start, but …
  • Adagios was throwing “error 500” messages and the Apache log was showing syntax errors in the related WSGI files: this one took a while to figure out but it boiled down to Python 2 vs. Python 3. Python 2.7 was officially deprecated at the beginning of 2020 but a lot of older packages (like Adagios) still use it. The upgrade had removed a bunch of Python 2.7-related packages. I had to track down the older versions of libapache2-mod-wsgi and python-simplejson (on ubuntu.pkgs.org) and once I re-installed them, Adagios started working normally again.

The October updates always seem to be more problematic for now, but now it’s up and running.

See you right here again in April for 21.04 Hirsute Hippo (and a COVID update?).

2 Comments

  1. Found another 20.10 post upgrade issue: for some reason the upgrade removed snapd which also removed certbot, which I use to renew my site certificates. Luckily I noticed before anything expired, but it’s odd that snapd was removed since it’s supposed to be automatically installed with Ubuntu.

    Anyway, I just had to sudo apt-install snapd and then sudo snap install --classic certbot to get everything working again.

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