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.