Hi Debian admins,
Debian 13 Trixie is out since 2025-08-09 and NS8 migration from Debian 12 to 13 should be possible now.
Please test the upgrade procedure on your Debian systems. Core 3.17 is required.
We would like to introduce a testing period until June for this upgrade procedure. In this period both, Debian 12 and 13 will be supported.
After the Testing phase, only Debian 13 will be supported. Support for 12 will be removed from the installer.
Migration steps from Debian 12 to 13
Don’t update during production time as services are restarted.
Upgrade NS8
Upgrade to NS8 core 3.17+ via Software Center.
Update the Debian OS
The sources need to be adapted for Debian 13 Trixie:
sed -i 's/bookworm/trixie/g' /etc/apt/sources.list /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*
Please check the sources in /etc/apt/sources.list and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/*. They should point to “trixie” instead of “bookworm”.
Start the OS upgrade:
apt update && apt full-upgrade -y
Following question can be answered with yes:
“Restart services during package upgrades without asking?”
Another question may come up:
“What do you want to do about modified configuration file sshd_config?”
In this case we “keep the local version currently installed”
Some cases were reported where exim4 was (re)installed due to the upgrade, creating a conflict with the Mail app. In that case exim4 must be disabled and removed:
systemctl disable exim4 --now
apt remove exim4 exim4-daemon-light
Update Python
To update Python from 3.11 to 3.13 you need to run the following: (the brackets are required)
(
set -e -x
core_dir=/usr/local/agent/pyenv
mv -v ${core_dir} ${core_dir}.bak
python3.13 -mvenv ${core_dir} --upgrade-deps --system-site-packages
${core_dir}/bin/pip3 install -r /etc/nethserver/pyreq3_13.txt
echo "/usr/local/agent/pypkg" >$(${core_dir}/bin/python3 -c "import sys; print(sys.path[-1] + '/pypkg.pth')")
rm -rf ${core_dir}.bak
)
Check python version, it should be 3.13.5 after the update:
runagent python3 --version # output should be 3.13.5
Modernize Debian source files
This is an optional step.
Debian introduced a new APT sources file format, see I Challenge Thee
To upgrade to the new file format:
apt modernize-sources
Reboot the server.
Now NS8 should run on Debian 13.