I use Proxmox for my clustering. Unfortunately when upgrading it with a standard apt upgrade recently it would hang when it would get to pve-ha-manager. Nothing I did would resolve this, and it would hang the system.

To fix this, I did the following.

  • kill the update process from another session (ps -ef | grep apt, find the process, kill [process ID])
    • Note: it’s possible you’ll have to kill dpkg or similar, but basically ensure the update has stopped completely
  • Mask the VM guests from starting with (systemctl mask pve-guests.service)
  • Reboot the system
  • Fix broken package updates (dpkg --configure -a)
  • Rerun the updates (apt dist-upgrade)
  • Re-enable VM guests on boot (systemctl unmask pve-guests.service)
  • Reboot the system again

This should resolve the issue and let you continue normally.