Failed upgrade, package installation failures, no gui

[ryantboldt]

I'm not sure what I did... I don't update / upgrade my proxmox that often. I was / am running a zfs installation. Yesterday I decided I wanted to try a lxc ubuntu container (my first attempt at lxc) I was getting incompatible errors when trying to use the offered ubuntu 18.04 image. Some looking at this forum led me to believe I needed to update / upgrade my install of proxmox. One thing I hadn't done before was add the non-subscriber respository so I proceeded to do that. I did an apt-get update, apt-get upgrade, apt-get dist-upgrade... did a reboot and lost my gui. SSH still works. I get a lot of package installation failures due to dependencies. I was seeing lines of "expected this version of this file but you have a lesser version installed" so I found another thread here where someone recommended downloading the versions directly from the proxmox site for debian etc. Now i just get different errors about how packages aren't configured etc.

I can and will provide more information here but I'm not sure what to provide yet. If people have commands I need to run and paste the output here I can. I appreciate any help anyone can provide.

 

[tom]

please never run "apt-get upgrade" - follow our upgrade guides.

try on install all packages with:

> apt install proxmox-ve
> apt dist-upgrade

 

[ryantboldt]

"please never run "apt-get upgrade" - follow our upgrade guides." Thank you, i'll be the first to admit I went about this rather recklessly.

root@pve:~# apt install proxmox-ve
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 proxmox-ve : Depends: pve-manager but it is not going to be installed
              Depends: qemu-server but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

root@pve:~# apt dist-upgrade
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

What's the output if you try to install 'pve-manager' and 'qemu-server manually?
(should this work continue with installing 'proxmox-ve')

 

[ryantboldt]

thank you guys for the continued support.

root@pve:~# apt install pve-manager
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 pve-manager : Depends: libpve-access-control (>= 5.1-7) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libpve-guest-common-perl (>= 2.0-14) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libpve-storage-perl (>= 5.0-35) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: librados2-perl but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: pve-container (>= 2.0-21) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: pve-firewall but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: qemu-server (>= 5.0-24) but it is not going to be installed
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

root@pve:~# apt install qemu-server
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Some packages could not be installed. This may mean that you have
requested an impossible situation or if you are using the unstable
distribution that some required packages have not yet been created
or been moved out of Incoming.
The following information may help to resolve the situation:

The following packages have unmet dependencies:
 qemu-server : Depends: genisoimage but it is not installable
               Depends: libpve-access-control (>= 5.0-7) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libpve-guest-common-perl (>= 2.0-20) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: libpve-storage-perl (>= 5.0-18) but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: pve-firewall but it is not going to be installed
               Depends: pve-qemu-kvm (>= 2.11.1-4) but 2.9.1-5 is to be installed
               Depends: libjson-c3 (>= 0.10) but it is not installable
E: Unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

qemu-server : Depends: genisoimage but it is not installable

hm - this is odd - what happens when you try to install genisoimage?

make sure you have the correct package repositories configured:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Package_Repositories
hope this helps!

 

[ryantboldt]

root@pve:~# apt install genisoimage
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
Package genisoimage is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'genisoimage' has no installation candidate
root@pve:~#

I am going to look at the package repositories now

 

[ryantboldt]

root@pve:~# apt install genisoimage
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree      
Reading state information... Done
Package genisoimage is not available, but is referred to by another package.
This may mean that the package is missing, has been obsoleted, or
is only available from another source

E: Package 'genisoimage' has no installation candidate
root@pve:~#

I am going to look at the package repositories now

Thank you!!!!!!! When I had gone to attempt to add the non subscription repository I had commented out deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian stretch main contrib as I thought the non sub repository was replacing that line. I removed the comment and ran update and dist-upgrade followed by and install proxmox-ve... a reboot later and we are back to working!!!

I am glad I chose to wait to hear back from you guys before choosing to lose my vms and reinstalling proxmox from scratch. I've wanted to get a subscription for years but haven't had the spare money. I look forward to supporting you guys in the future!! Thanks again, best wishes.

 

[kapi2454]

What is the problem if I run "apt-get upgrade" ?
Where are the update guides?
thankyou!!

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

What is the problem if I run "apt-get upgrade" ?

Not sure I understand the question - but if you want to know why you need to run 'apt-get dist-upgrade' (or 'apt full-upgrade') instead of 'apt-get upgrade') - the reason is that PVE does pull in new dependencies during our regular package releases - and 'apt' does not pull them in if you only run 'apt-get upgrade' - this can break the installed packages

Always update your PVE Systems with 'apt-get update', 'apt-get dist-upgrade'

Where are the update guides?

The sysadmin chapter of our reference documentation is a good starting point:
https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html
else our wiki has pages for upgrading from one major release to the other - e.g. to upgrade from PVE 5 to PVE 6:
https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Upgrade_from_5.x_to_6.0

I hope this helps!