Remotely Upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04

Is there a way to remote into a machine and upgrade to 16.04, the problem I have run into is at some point it will disconnect the network and then the pc is unusable?

Big gotcha - 16.04 changed the names of the NIC device…

e.g. from something nice and simple like “eth0” to something stupid and longwinded like “enp0s3” (and worse - some with like 12-15 chars - e.g. my 18.04 laptop : “enp0s31f6” :rage::face_with_symbols_over_mouth: ) - it’s a PITA. and even worse - the name for wifi devices…

I think in 18.x they’ve gone back to shorter names again (e.g. “en01” and “wlp2s0” etc)…

Recently had to rescue a few developers who did a “do-dist-upgrade” to go from 14.04 to 16.04 - after update no longer accessible on network (VMware ESX guests)… Luckily I had access to the VM consoles via vSphere/vCenter…

So - before rebooting - you should try and maybe figure out what the NIC will get renamed to - and have an entry in /etc/network/interfaces to match the new NIC device name (or maybe /etc/netplan/01-netcfg-yaml - WhyTF do they have to keep changing SH*T every release - netplan recently had me scratching my head in perplexity! - but I think you’re safe with 16.04 - should just be /etc/network/interfaces file)…

If you don’t do that - you’ll need access remotely to the console (which isn’t really possible with things like AWS EC2)…

P.S. Debian/Ubuntu obfuscation of network configuration is the main thing I hate about them! And all that changing from one release to another - why?.. I don’t personally run any RedHat based distros - but I support server platforms in my job, and network configuration is much more consistent across RHEL, CentOS, OEL et al : /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-{nic-device} - and no vast changes from RH 5, 6 or 7…

Is Fedora going netplan? I guess I should take a look at it myself…

edit : update - Just rolled a Fedora 28 server “netinstall” - and no it doesn’t use netplan! Old faithful logical /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-{nic-device-name} file!

edit2 : something I always do when provisioning a VM from a recent distro (e.g. CentOS 7, Ubuntu 16, Debian Stretch) - I append IP address into /etc/issue (first need to determine the main NIC name) - then I do something like (as root “sudo -i”) :

echo "IPV4: \4{ens160}" >> /etc/issue

(where ens160 is my main NIC)…

That way when I fire up the console - I can see the IP address and SSH to it - because there’s no copy/paste of text in VMware or Virtualbox consoles for “headless” (i.e. non GUI) builds…

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