do-release-upgrade no longer works from lucid to precise

[Louis Bouchard]

When trying to run do-release-upgrade to go from Lucid to Precise, the upgrade fails with :

Error authenticating some packages

It was not possible to authenticate some packages. This may be a
transient network problem. You may want to try again later. See below
for a list of unauthenticated packages.

accountsservice ...

Workaround is to add the following statement in /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.d/unauth.cfg :
[Distro]
AllowUnauthenticated=yes

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Alex Muntada (alex.muntada)]

I spent quite some time debugging this yesterday adding extra information on the logs and I finally found that it's a transient error due to the state of the remote mirror. Using archive.ubuntu.com makes no difference (I guess because it's not the mirror master).

Thus, after trying many times, do-release-upgrade eventually accepted all packages as trusted. Tried a couple of times more and it worked fine each time. A few minutes later it failed again. All this without any changes in the code, so the problem is that something is happening in the remote end that lucid doesn't like.

I also found that the workaround didn't work (I'm not sure why) so this is what I did:

 1. run do-release-upgrade and wait until it fails
 2. cd $(ls -trd /tmp/tmp* | tail -1)
 3. edit DistUpgradeCache.py and find the comment "check if the user overwrote the unauthenticated warning"
 4. add a new line below with "return True" that will avoid aborting and save the file
 5. run ./precise

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Bug 1538299 is about packages being downgraded being disguised as unauthenticated ones. However, if I recall Louis's bug correctly nearly every package was unauthenticated which would be a surprising number of packages in L > P.

[William Gallafent (william-gallaf)]

Note that the workaround given in the bug description works only for network upgrades: Attempting to use the `sudo sh /cdrom/cdromupgrade` route (using an alternate install dvd) will still fail.

[nasenmann72 (mhoppstaedter)]

I have the same issue. No release upgrade possible

[Bjorge Dijkstra (bjd)]

Instead of modifying the code as described earlier you can also create a config file /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades.d/unauth.cfg with the following contents:

[Distro]
AllowUnauthenticated=true

[Alex Muntada (alex.muntada)]

@bjd The "AllowUnauthenticated=true" work-around did not work in my case, thus I had to patch the code as explained above.

[Rasmus Sten (m-ubuntuon0-r)]

With the risk of stating the obvious, allowing unauthenticated packages is not really an acceptable workaround.

[Matthew T. Russotto (mrussotto)]

It appears the public key for the precies-security and precise-updates package isn't available during the update. Adding it manually with

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv 40976EAF437D05B5

worked for all but one package, java-package, which I simply removed.

[Nowell Morris (nowell29)]

Confirmed comment #3 fixed my issue of upgrading from 10.04 to 12.04. I did have a number of 404 errors in the output, but the update manager seemed to have retrieved all that was necessary to do the upgrade. I had added the AllowUnauthenticated=true statement to /etc/update-manager/release-upgrades because there was no file in release-upgrades.d/ but doing so on its own, or before making the manual changes in post #3, would not work by itself. It seems that #3 would be sufficient without adding the AllowUna.. to any file anyways.