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Wednesday 28 June 2023 - Debian Bookworm

Debian Bookworm was released this month, and with that we are starting to upgrade our systems. Our standard build of the previous release more or less upgrades cleanly, but we had to make the following changes to get rid of a Failed to connect to bus: No such file or directory error which arose when rebooting or during some other actions.

It's caused by the lack of dbus in our standard build, which didn't cause any problems before but now systemd (this isn't a post about whether systemd is awful or not) seems to require interaction with it during certain actions. Fortunately the error seems to be cosmetic, but to make it go away, run the following as root:

apt-get install dbus-user-session

After that, you can start dbus manually, or it should start on reboot and the messages will be gone.

The other problem we encountered is that libapache2-request-perl was dropped. It's a surprise that this module didn't make it into bookworm, we understand that perl may not be the trendy programming language of the week however there is going to be gigabytes of it still holding the internet together. It does at least look to have been picked up again and is in the current testing. As a workaround, we took that version (2.17-3), changed the dependencies to suit and created a bookworm compatible .deb file that has plugged the hole.

Following a recent customer ticket, we would also suggest you not let it replace /etc/default/grub, or if you do, make sure you have GRUB_TERMINAL=serial in there somewhere, otherwise it will try to communicate with a VGA device that's not present and this makes it reboot. If you've already done this, then you can use the recovery console to boot an alternative kernel and fix it.