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make it through upgrades of old droplets. the freebsd one
was at 11.2, and the ubuntu one was 16.04.  one of the major
issues i had was freebsd all of a sudden being switched to
using 32-bit libs. lib-elf was like "dafuq?".  the other
issues was losing sudo/root access while upgrading by minor
version. i have had great luck with upgrading to the latest
11.x release (11.4) and then upgrading to the latest 12.x
releases (12.2). so far the system appears stable. i'm
currently trying to upgrade to the latest 13.x release
(13.0) - fingers crossed!

upgrading ubuntu was not any better, just different. i chose
to upgrade to 18.04 first and immediately had some issues
with out-dated sources.list entries. once updated, i was
able to do a full upgrade of packages to those available in
18.04 repos. soon after, i was able to install a newer
version of update-manager and successfully run
do-release-upgrade to get to 18.04. I surprisingly didn't
have to go through the same foreplay going to 20.04. i was
able to use do-release-upgrade again to upgrade and it went
smoothly.

let's go, 13.0-RELEASE upgrade!
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