How to enable esm-infra-legacy on Trusty#
The esm-infra-legacy service can be enabled with the Legacy Support add-on to grant an additional two years of
extended security coverage. This service is only available on 14.04 LTS (Trusty), since the release has reached
the end of its support period for esm-infra. Check out this article to learn more about the expansion of Long Term Support for Trusty and how to contact Canonical to purchase this additional support.
Make sure ua is up-to-date#
All Trusty systems come with ua pre-installed through the
ubuntu-advantage-tools package. To make sure that you’re running the latest
version of ua, run the following commands:
sudo apt update && sudo apt install ubuntu-advantage-tools
Note that on Trusty, Ubuntu Pro is referred to by its previous name: “Ubuntu Advantage” (or ua).
Check the status of the services#
After you have attached to a Pro subscription and
updated the ubuntu-advantage-tools package, you can check which services
are enabled by running the following command:
sudo ua status
This will show you which services are enabled or disabled on your machine, (output truncated for brevity). With the addition of Legacy Support, it will now show the esm-infra-legacy service on Trusty:
SERVICE ENTITLED STATUS DESCRIPTION
esm-infra yes enabled Expanded Security Maintenance for Infrastructure
esm-infra-legacy yes disabled Expanded Security Maintenance for Infrastructure on Legacy Instances
livepatch yes enabled Canonical Livepatch service
Enabling esm-infra-legacy#
If you are entitled to the esm-infra-legacy service as shown above, you can enable it by running:
sudo ua enable esm-infra-legacy
What if esm-infra-legacy is not entitled?#
If ua status shows that you are not entitled to the service, you
will first need to buy access to the service, as mentioned at the top of this page.
Once you have purchased the Legacy Support add-on, run the following command on your machine to refresh the contract definitions:
sudo ua refresh
After refreshing the contract data, you can confirm that the service is now entitled by running:
sudo ua status
The output should now show that you are entitled to the esm-infra-legacy service, and you can now enable the service as outlined in the enablement section.
Trusty caveats#
There are some known caveats for the Trusty version of ubuntu-advantage-tools:
Disabling esm-infra also disables esm-infra-legacy#
If you disable esm-infra, this will (due to internal dependencies) also disable
esm-infra-legacy. Although updates will only be applied via esm-infra-legacy,
we recommend keeping both services enabled. This is not true in reverse: if you want
to disable esm-infra-legacy, doing so will not disable esm-infra.
do-release-upgrade fails if packages are installed from esm-infra#
If esm-infra is enabled and packages are installed from that source, the
do-release-upgrade operation will fail since there will be an APT dependency issue
when performing the operation.
You can address this issue by running do-release-upgrade with the following command:
sudo RELEASE_UPGRADER_ALLOW_THIRD_PARTY=1 do-release-upgrade
It is important to note that you will need to re-enable the Ubuntu Pro services again
once you have upgraded to Xenial, since Trusty lacks the correct mechanisms to re-enable
the Pro services automatically after a do-release-upgrade.
Note that this is only the case when upgrading from Trusty to Xenial. The Ubuntu Pro Client is fully supported from Xenial onward, where these issues have already been fixed.
Why 14.04 (Trusty) no longer receives new Ubuntu Pro Client features#
For a further reduced risk of regressions on 14.04 (Trusty) the Pro client package is almost frozen.
Hence it is not receiving regular new features like newer Ubuntu LTS releases do. Beyond
version 19.7 there won’t be updates except any critical CVE maintenance or features explicitly
targeted for Trusty (like esm-infra-legacy in 2024).
Version 19.7 has full-featured support of the applicable Ubuntu Pro
service offerings esm-infra, esm-infra-legacy and livepatch.