Seems that a few of my instances in AWS were originally setup using Ubuntu 12.10. Don’t know how that happened, but anyways. Now that 12.10 is no longer support you can’t just upgrade.
So the solution is to use the old.releases.ubuntu.com site and update/upgrade from there.
sudo cp /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.bak sudo sed -i -re 's/us-west-2.ec2.archive.ubuntu.com|security.ubuntu.com/old-releases.ubuntu.com/g' /etc/apt/sources.list sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo do-release-upgrade
This got me to 13.10, then another do-release-upgrade got me to 14.04.5.