A few months after the release of Debian 12, I finally decided to upgrade my home server. Proxmox 8 also arrived. Is it worth upgrading? I haven’t found anything special in the new versions, but given my profession, I’m simply obliged to test new features at home first. :)
The upgrade went smoothly overall. However, one of my ancient LXC containers on CentOS 7 eventually refused to start. The culprit was an outdated version of cgroup. There were two possible solutions.
- Add the following to /etc/default/grub:
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=»systemd.unified_cgroup_hierarchy=0 quiet»
Then update the bootloader configuration and reboot. - Just give it a shot, pull everything I need out of the container, and move it to Debian, because Centos isn’t my thing anymore anyway. That’s exactly what I did…
Debian 12 now has two non-free repositories. The second one contains divers and is called non-free-firmware, so if your hardware requires closed-source drivers, don’t forget to add it too.
Everything seemed to be going great, but after 18 days (according to the uptime), the light in my toilet suddenly stopped working. :( What does that have to do with anything, you ask? Well, it’s a smart home! As it turns out, the server’s network suddenly crashed.
«Aaaaaah!!» I thought, and quickly googled other users’ complaints about the r8169 driver in Debian 12.
The suggested solution is to replace the driver. Register non-free and non-free-firmware as described above, run «apt update» and «apt install pve-headers r8168-dkms«
During installation, the previous r8169 driver will be disabled automatically, so you will only need to reboot.
I can’t comment on the reliability of this fix yet, as the bug initially appeared only 18 days later, and I only replaced the driver today. If the problem recurs, I’ll update this article. :)
That’s all for now.
P.S.
Don’t rush to update the products, this might not be the only bug… By the way, I also had to dance a bit with the drivers for the Dell PowerEdge R740 14th generation network.