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GitLab 14.0 Support Readiness - Removal/Deprecation - Ubuntu 16.04 support

Summary

The purpose of this issue is to:

  • Assess the impact of the following feature removal or deprecation planned for 14.0.
  • Document what actions customers must/should perform to mitigate the impact of the change.
  • Track findings from support tickets and other sources related to the change.

Links to Change:

Assignee: @greg

Impact Assessment

Moderate.

Those affected:

  • anyone running GitLab or GitLab runner on Ubuntu 16.04

Mitigations/Workarounds

Migrate GitLab from Ubuntu 16.04 to a Supported Linux Distribution

In-place OS upgrade is not recommended as it's riskier, but it is possible. If one opts for in-place OS upgrade, its suggested that you backup GitLab data on an external drive and take a filesystem snapshot if possible.

Support Notes

OS upgrades are not typically inside the scope of GitLab support as unsupported operating systems are not a GitLab component or feature.

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Support Resources

ZenDesk Macro

Support::Self-Managed::16.04 End of Life

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/support/support-ops/zendesk-macros/-/merge_requests/240

Support Team Playbook

This draft is a brain dump of things that could help point customers in the right direction and troubleshoot when things go awry during an OS upgrade in a way that causes GitLab to be down or unresponsive.

It is suggested that have a a filesystem snapshot and/or a backup of your GitLab data stored on a separate machine before proceeding with an OS upgrade or migration.

Options

Option A: Migrate GitLab from Ubuntu 16.04 server new Ubuntu 18/20.04 server

  1. Backup GitLab on 16.04 server
  2. Spin up new Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04 server on seperate box
  3. Install GitLab on 18/20.04 box using same GitLab version installed on Ubuntu 16.04 box
  4. Copy backup to new 18/20.04 server
  5. Restore backup on new 18/20.04 server

Option B: In-place upgrade

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-upgrade-to-ubuntu-18-04

  1. Upgrade to latest version of available packages. OS upgrade will fail unless you're running the latest version of 16.04 packages.
  • Upgrade to latest available version of GitLab
  • Upgrade all packages on your machine sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
  1. sudo do-release-upgrade (ensure you'll be available and attentive, this process will require user interaction and shouldn't be stopped once it's started)
  2. Follow prompts, select to not change configuration if in doubt.
  3. Reboot
  4. Add GitLab package repository for your new OS version
curl https://packages.gitlab.com/install/repositories/gitlab/gitlab-ee/script.deb.sh | sudo bash
  1. sudo apt update

Troubleshooting

  • apt update shows no GitLab updates

    • customer running Ubuntu 16.04? if yes, we stopped building packages for 16.04 due to it being EoL.
    • customer running Ubuntu 18.04/20.04? package repo was commented out during OS upgrade, need to add it back with the curl | sudo bash command (or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gitlab_gitlab-ee.list manually to point to bionic (18.04) or fossa (20.04))

  • apt install gitlab-ee show no packages matching gitlab-ee available

    • package repo was commented out during OS upgrade, need to add it back with the curl | sudo bash command (or edit /etc/apt/sources.list.d/gitlab_gitlab-ee.list manually to point to bionic (18.04) or fossa (20.04))

  • SSH session terminated in the middle of OS upgrade.

    • try to login again and pick up where you left off. start with sudo apt dist-upgrade, sudo dpkg --reconfigure -a or sudo apt --fix-broken install might help.
    • if can't connect via SSH
      • disaster recovery (restore from backup or filesystem snapshot)
      • try to reboot server
Edited by Katrin Leinweber