Linux Server Upgrade Pain

There I was, knee-deep in an SSH session, trying to update my server for the 4th or 5th time when I got the last fail message I was willing to accept. It turns out that this isn’t particularly uncommon. When you are trying to execute an upgrade, you’ve got to have all your repo’s correct, as it appears that the errors will cause a failure.

The craziest and most frustrating part of this battle was the fact that NGINX wasn’t in my source.list, so I couldn’t (still haven’t) figured out why it was so stuck. It wasn’t installed or in existence on my server. (As far as I and the internet could figure out.)

Below are the 2 threads that helped me resolve the issue.

https://nginx.org/en/linux_packages.html#Ubuntu
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1047517/apt-upgrade-error

The error that got me:

A problem occurred during the update. This is usually some sort of 
network problem, please check your network connection and retry. 

I had to look at the syntax above to find the NGINX error, which required updating the NGINX PGP key.
curl https://nginx.org/keys/nginx_signing.key | gpg –dearmor \
| sudo tee /usr/share/keyrings/nginx-archive-keyring.gpg >/dev/null

When you’re looking for your error, look for all the HITs.
“Hit http:”, then look for the IGN followed by the ERR, that’s where your core problem is.

If you find an error that isn’t as legit as NGINX, you’ll want to look at this solution, which can be found on the AskUbuntu link above. [Find the files inside /etc/apt/sources.list.d that contains the above repositories. Rename those files so they don’t end with a .list extension (for instance, rename them to filename.list.old).]

After deeper looking, I was able to [ls | grep -i nginx], which showed me the files causing the issue. As you can tell, I’m not pro-level, just a dude sharing his challenges. If you enjoyed this, feel free to reach out and chat or share your discoveries. The long-term goal for me is to automate as much of my farm as possible and share that setup with others so you too can reduce the amount of work and cost of growing your own food.