Updating End-of-Life Operating Systems

It’s crucial to keep your machine’s OS up to date and to act before it reaches end-of-life. Outdated OS’s will put your machine at heightened risk of cyber attacks, which in turn could lead to Cybersecurity containing your machine if it is compromised.

Operating Systems are only supported for a limited time. When they reach their end-of-life, they’re not supported and they don’t receive security updates anymore. This leaves you defenseless against cyber attacks, putting not just your own machine and data at risk, but also the cybersecurity of the University at large. The risk increases particularly if your VM has a public IP address. For these reasons, keeping your systems up to date needs to be a key and regular part of your machine hygiene.

• If your machine is end-of-life, we can’t support it.

• If your machine is compromised, the Cybersecurity team may ‘contain’ it (meaning you’ll lose access, and all its contents, since it won’t be safe to extract or recover them).

How long do operating systems last?

For Ubuntu, Long Term Support (LTS) releases are enterprise grade releases and receive five years of standard security maintenance for all packages in the ‘Main’ repository. They are published every two years in April. You are expected to release upgrade your machine before the security maintenance expires.

How to know if your system has reached its end-of-life

To check which OS version you are using, open a terminal and type the following command line prompts to show which version you are using:

• For Ubuntu: lsb_release -a

• For redhat and other systems: cat /etc/*release*

How to update your OS version

You have two options to update an OS version that has reached, or is soon to reach EOL:

Option 1: Migrate your system

Migrate your system to a new VM, where that VM uses the latest OS:

• launch a new instance using the instructions in the ‘Launch an instance’ section of our Getting Started tutorial

• then reinstall your applications and migrate your data to the new VM

Option 2: Do an in-place upgrade

You can follow vendors' steps to upgrade your systems, noting that vendors may only allow upgrades to the immediate next version, so if your OS version is more than one version behind you might need to do this as many times as necessary to bring it to the latest version.

For Ubuntu and Debian-based systems on your command line:

• First update the package list and then upgrade the installed packages: sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

• Next, upgrade to the next LTS release: sudo do-release-upgrade

See detailed vendor instructions for more info:

• UBUNTU: https://documentation.ubuntu.com/server/how-to/software/upgrade-your-release/

• DEBIAN: https://wiki.debian.org/DebianUpgrade