Do a release upgrade 10.04 to 12.04 LTS in a byobu / screen session

Question

I am about to do a release upgrade on a 10.04 server to 12.04. I am going to need to do this over SSH, is it advisable to do this in a byobu / screen session in case of any unforeseen disconnects? or will doing this in a screen session bring in an extra layer of improbability?

Thanks.

Answer 1

If you are afraid to lose your SSH connection during the process, you can just type a & at the end of your command. E.g.: sudo apt-get dist-upgrade &. This gives you back your prompt. If now the SSH session gets interrupted but the remote machine is still connected to the internet, the upgrade will continue. Using screen (or byobu) won't hurt but won't add extra protection, either.

Answer 2

Okay I have learnt the hard way!, I did a release upgrade over Byobu, It all goes well until later on in the upgrade when the byoubu package itself gets upgraded and then its game over you lose the session.

However

I had to do a few of these upgrades so I ran up a 10.04 LTS VM and this time put byobu on hold via dpkg

# Put byobu on hold with dpkg
sudo su -
echo "byobu hold" | dpkg --set-selections
#check it is on hold
dpkg -l | grep byobu
byobu    hold
exit

and ran the release upgrade again. The release upgrade honored the hold and left Byobu alone. afterwards when i was in my new 12.04 system I could release the hold

echo "byobu install" | dpkg --set-selections

and then just install the latest version of byobu

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade