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Debian 11 runs out on Monday

Bullseye's Long Term Support ends August 31st, five years after release, per Debian's own lifecycle page. The OS inventory has it in two places nobody lists: the base images and the appliances.

Pixel drawing of an hourglass with nearly all the sand in the bottom bulb

Monday is the date. The bullseye release page spells out the lifecycle: five years, three of full support that ended August 14th, 2024, and two of Long Term Support "until August 31st, 2026." LTS only ever covered four architectures, i386, amd64, armhf and arm64. After Monday, no more free updates.

The estate answer to "do we run Debian 11" is a server count, and the server count is the small half. Check two other places.

  1. Dockerfiles. Grep the repos for FROM debian:11, bullseye and bullseye-slim. A base image does not show up in any OS inventory, and a rebuild next week will happily pull a frozen distribution onto a fresh container.
  2. Appliances. The virtual appliance your vendor shipped in 2022 is a Debian box with a logo on the login screen. Run the inventory by reading /etc/os-release across the fleet, not by asking who installed what.

The upgrade target is Debian 12, already three years old and in full support, and the path is the documented dist-upgrade. One release at a time, per the LTS rule: skipping to 13 from 11 is not supported and never was.

Weekend plans are a fine reason to start the greps on Friday.