Upgrading Ubuntu 18.04 in 2024

13.10.2024 — Ubuntu, esm, 18.04, Upgrade — 1 min read

A quick guide for those (like me) who are trying to upgrade old labs Ubuntu 18 labs, only to find 18 is out of support and the upgrade path is completely broken.

Here's a snippit of the error you may be seeing:

E: Failed to fetch https://esm.ubuntu.com/infra/ubuntu/pool/main/g/glibc/libc6_2.27-3ubuntu1.6+esm3_amd64.deb  401  Unauthorized [IP: 91.189.91.47 443]
E: Failed to fetch https://esm.ubuntu.com/infra/ubuntu/pool/main/p/pam/libpam0g_1.1.8-3.6ubuntu2.18.04.6+esm1_amd64.deb  401  Unauthorized [IP: 91.189.91.47 443]
E: Failed to fetch https://esm.ubuntu.com/infra/ubuntu/pool/main/p/pam/libpam-modules-bin_1.1.8-3.6ubuntu2.18.04.6+esm1_amd64.deb  401  Unauthorized [IP: 91.189.91.47 443]

To fix this, you may have seen a bunch of articles and Stack Overflow questions, but it's not quite working for you.

Try this (if you have landed on this page by sheer determination):

Edit the following files:

/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-esm-infra.list
/etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-esm-infra.list.distUpgrade

Comment out any uncommented sources
Run the apt upgrade command again.

Hopefully this starts working for you now and you're unblocked and you can run:

sudo do-release-upgrade