A long standing Nagios install (Ubuntu 8.10) has been tasking me over the last few days as although it has run without a blip for many years (probably being rebooted about once a year) it has no doubt reached its EOL (End OF Life).
Given the lack of problems I hadn’t bother to upgrade the machine OS and it was when I tried to do this I realised the issue. The updates needed to upgrade to newer releases are no longer available. I made an attempt to work around this by picking up files from the alternative locations I googled for this problem but after consideration decided to migrate completely to a new VM built from scratch. This reminded my why good documentation is important.
I was able to identify and transfer those components of Nagios and other apps that ran on the old VM to the new one. The subsequent update of various components of the machine OS to give me the latest and greatest everything mean now that I can maintain the machine at the latest levels. I decided this approach was better that patching , upgrading , patching an upgrading again to get to where I needed to be.
Worth bearing in mind if you have older 8.10 or Ubuntu 9 servers – better get your upgrade plans in place and tested. Even better fun when they are virtual.