Why does EC2 instance have problems upgrading my Ubuntu server to 12.04?

Question

I just tried upgrading our Ubuntu EC2 server to 12.04 from 11.10, and it halts on several package upgrades, starting with memtest86+. CTRL+C is the only way out, and in the end there is the following error:

Errors were encountered while processing:
 memtest86+
 ubuntu-standard
 grub-legacy-ec2
 grub-pc
 friendly-recovery
 linux-image-3.2.0-24-virtual
 python-apport
 linux-image-virtual
 linux-virtual
 apport

Any advice on what went wrong and how to fix it?

UPDATE: Turns out to be a problem with GRUB, though I still don't understand what is going wrong. Why is GRUB used with EC2 at all?

there is no other error message, it just freezes at "Setting up memtest86+ (4.20-1.1ubuntu1) ..." — yuttadhammo, May 01 '12 at 11:14
What release are you starting with? What AMI id are you using as a base? — Eric Hammond, May 02 '12 at 03:01

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 01 '12 at 11:29

Try the upgrade again, but this time open a second ssh session to the server, and monitor some metrics:

vmstat 5 will alert you to memory problems
iostat 5 will show you if there is any I/O happening
top will show you any problems with CPU spikes or load average
using the sysstat package, you can log many of these metrics and view them later

Find out if anything is happening. View the list of running processes in top or ps auxfw for clues. Check active network connections with netstat -utnp. Once you have this info post back anything unusual or anything you don't understand.

Why does EC2 instance have problems upgrading my Ubuntu server to 12.04?

1 Answers1