Hi Martijn, On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 05:49:12PM +0200, Martijn Grooten wrote: You only have the kernel from Debian squeeze installed. I don't know how it would be possible to upgrade through so many major releases without ever installing or using a newer kernel. It makes me wonder if the server is truly running Debian buster. In your /etc/apt/sources you list the release as "stable". Normally best practice is to use the release name there (e.g. "squeeze", "buster") so that the release doesn't change when a new stable release is made. I am hesitant to advise simply trying to install the ekrnel package for Debian stable ("linux-image-686-pae") because it isn't clear to em that you actually are running Debian stable. Have you actually done an upgrade through each successive release (squeeze, wheezy, jessie, stretch, buster) or did you just change /etc/apt/sources.list to not say "squeeze" and instead say "stable"? What is the output of: $ cat /etc/debian_version Also if you could do this: $ dpkg -l > package_list.txt and attach that to the email? That will tell us exactly what package versions you have. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

Hi Martijn, On Wed, Feb 12, 2020 at 06:28:51PM +0200, Martijn Grooten wrote: Right, so it is at least partially upgraded to Debian 10. Just picking on the first few packages I see… […] This one is from Debian 6 but maybe is just because you've constantly upgraded from there. The above set from Debian 9… The above are from Debian 9… And that one is from Debian 10, so again suggests that Debian 10 was partially installed. It's not as bad as I feared though; you definitely do have some packages from Debian 10. Some really crucial ones are still from Debian 9 though. e.g. dpkg and apt. I think Kamal was probably correct in suggesting that you stopped getting kernel updates when the kernel package name changed and have since been stuck on an older kernel. The need for a more modern kernel has probably caused the upgrade from Debian 9 to Debian 10 to fail so it's only partially gone through. To be honest as you ideally also want to go to 64-bit quite soon, I think I would recommend asking for a new account in which you can install a clean Debian 10 and port all your things over across a period of up to 2 weeks for free: https://tools.bitfolk.com/wiki/Migrating_to_a_new_VPS If you didn't want to do that but instead wanted to try to fix this in place, I suppose what I would do is: 1. Install the kernel from Debian 10 by doing "sudo apt install linux-image-686-pae" (this is a virtual package which at the moment should also pull in the real kernel package "linux-image-4.19.0-8-686-pae") 2. Check with update-grub that it finds it and that it's first in the boot order 3. Reboot into it. 4. Complete your upgrade by doing "sudo apt dist-upgrade" The thing is that quite a lot of packages are going to be upgraded and there's no way to stop that happening because it will also happen when you do the "sudo apt --fix-broken install" that it might want you to do first. It will probably go okay but is likely to be a lengthy process and some software might need reconfiguring. So I wouldn't try it unless I had some time to spare to do it all in one go. Maybe it ends up being simple, but on the other hand it might also fight you. It knows already that the package database is inconsistent, and the --fix-broken will try to fix that by installing the dependencies it thinks it needs, but possibly some of those will need a newer kernel so won't install, and you get stuck. It could involve going to: https://packages.debian.org/buster/linux-image-4.19.0-8-686-pae then following the download links to: http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/pool/main/l/linux-signed-i386/linux-image-4… downloading that and force installing it with dpkg -i. That then may fail because of missing dependencies, so you'd have to download the dependencies too, and add them to the dpkg -i line. Could be quite hairy. If you do complete the above steps you'd then finally want to reboot again to make sure everything starts cleanly. I would also recommend editing /etc/apt/sources.list and replacing every instance of "stable" with "buster". Otherwise, when Debian 11 ("bullseye") is released the very next time you try to install something it will try to install the bullseye version. It is better to plan the time when you will do a major release upgrade. If you'd like to go with the new account route then just drop support(a)bitfolk.com an email with the information requested in the article. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting

I think i had this issue a few years ago when upgrading Debian, I can't really recall what I did it fix it, but I seem to remember something about the kernel name had changed and so wouldn't upgrade since they no longer where updating that kernel name. Actually re-reading, I think they dropped the -bigmem and went with -pae. So try having a close look at the newer kernel version names. You just need to install the newer version reboot and remove the older version. Kamal. On Thu, 13 Feb 2020 at 03:03, Andy Smith <andy(a)bitfolk.com> wrote: