Proxmox Container with Debian 10 does not work after upgrade

September 8, 2019

I just did an apt update / upgrade of a Debian 10 container and restarted it afterwards and got following:

# pct start 105
Job for [email protected] failed because the control process exited with error code.
See "systemctl status [email protected]" and "journalctl -xe" for details.
command 'systemctl start pve-container@105' failed: exit code 1

with a more verbose startup I got following

# lxc-start -n 105 -F -l DEBUG -o /tmp/lxc-ID.log
lxc-start: 105: conf.c: run_buffer: 335 Script exited with status 25
lxc-start: 105: start.c: lxc_init: 861 Failed to run lxc.hook.pre-start for container "105"
lxc-start: 105: start.c: __lxc_start: 1944 Failed to initialize container "105"
lxc-start: 105: tools/lxc_start.c: main: 330 The container failed to start
lxc-start: 105: tools/lxc_start.c: main: 336 Additional information can be obtained by setting the --logfile and --logpriority options

and a look into /tmp/lxc-ID.log shows the problem:

lxc-start 105 20190908130857.595 DEBUG conf - conf.c:run_buffer:326 - Script exec /usr/share/lxc/hooks/lxc-pve-prestart-hook 105 lxc pre-start with output: unsupported debian version '10.1'
lxc-start 105 20190908130857.604 ERROR conf - conf.c:run_buffer:335 - Script exited with status 25
lxc-start 105 20190908130857.604 ERROR start - start.c:lxc_init:861 - Failed to run lxc.hook.pre-start for container "105"

The problem was that the Debian version, which changed from 10.0 to 10.1, was not recognized by the Proxmox script. The responsible code is in /usr/share/perl5/PVE/LXC/Setup/Debian.pm, but in this case I didn’t need to change anything as I just needed to update the Proxmox host to the newest minor version and it worked again, as the code in Debian.pm got changed by the developers. I just though to share this, as maybe others run into that problem, as the error reporting is not that good in that case. 🙂