We recently made it possible for installations running on V16 Update 8 to upgrade to V18 Alpha 4. This also means having your Linux Operating System upgraded from Debian 9 to Debian 10 Buster.

V18 alpha 4 Upgrade Screenshot

As you can understand, this is a major upgrade of your base operating system and bears its risks. Therefore we optimized, safeguarded and reviewed the process on the following platforms, multiple times, to ensure the upgrade is executed smoothly:

  • Installation based on the 3CX ISO with no further modifications.
  • Leading cloud platform providers (including their monitoring agents)
    • Amazon EWS
    • Amazon LightSail
    • Digital Ocean
    • OVH Public Cloud
    • Microsoft Azure
    • Google Cloud (Compute Engine)
  • Pi 3B+ and Pi4 (the upgrade might take up to 1h)

Currently the upgrade process runs with a 97% success rate. We gather logs solely for debugging purposes which are deleted shortly after an upgrade is completed. Logs of failed upgrades (accounting for only 3%) are reviewed by our engineers to determine potential pitfalls and improve the update process. Up until now, our investigations concluded that systems on which the upgrade failed were modified. So far the most common reasons for failure that we cannot or will not attempt to address are:

  • PBXs with capital letters in FQDN (Temporary).
  • Manually added repositories.
  • Manually installed packages, causing dependencies issues.
  • Changed or removed default Debian repositories.
  • Remote administration tools such as Ansible and Puppet that could interfere during the upgrade process (e.g locking APT during the process).
  • Remote monitoring tools such as Zabbix, Datadog etc
  • Altered locale or TZdata without updating the OS fully via dpkg commands.
  • Modified/broken nginx configuration files.
  • Tampered root certificates.
  • Restricted internet access for apt to call the update (outbound port 80 is required).

If you are unsure whether your system meets the requirements, due to it being modified, we recommend taking a backup of your 3CX system and restoring it on a fresh 3CX Debian 10 ISO installation.

For more information read our guide on: Installing 3CX using 3CX Debian ISO.