SBC Update from Debian 12 to 13 Not Detecting Current OS Version

[Gavino]

EDIT:

I shut down the VM, took another VM snapshot, and booted up again.
After boot up I ran it from my own bash env with just "sudo ./sbcdebian12to13.sh" rather than "sudo bash sbcdebian12to13.sh" and hey presto - it worked! I can't say if it was the reboot or calling the script directly but glad it completed OK. Something for the devs to check out.

I'll be doing a test install on a HA pair of my lab Raspberry Pi 4B 8GB devices sometime this week and then probably cutover the production Raspberry Pi SBCs with fresh installs starting on the weekend.


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I am very excited to see support for Debian 13 for the SBCs - thank you devs! There is a long-standing issue when running HA setups and switches do firmware updates - the SBCs can get themselves locked up. I have been working around that by putting SBCs in maintenance mode "crm configure property maintenance-mode=true" then stopping pacemaker, corosync and 3cxsbc before network switch firmware updates. I am really hoping that Debian 13 fixes these lockups (as I have read about in other Linux forums) so am super keen to try this upgrade.

Anyway not off to the best start. I have a 3CX SBC set up on Proxmox amd64 install where I did everything standard and there's no SBC HA (only Proxmox HA) so should be fairly simple. I followed the guide here: https://www.3cx.com/blog/releases/sbc-beta-debian-13/

As per guide I downloaded the upgrade script, set it as executable and "sudo bash sbcdebian12to13.sh" ran it. Copying just the yellow log items.

====== [21:31:33] Starting: Backup script /home/techsupport/sbcdebian12to13.sh
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Backup script version: e34b931681dc1326882b7f0c8963d84d793b8b88
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Current directory: /tmp
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Current user: root
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Current date: Mon 10 Aug 2026 21:31:33 AEST
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Current version:
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Architecture: amd64
====== [21:31:33] Starting: Hostname: GT3CXSBC01
====== [21:31:33] Prepare: Installing jq...
====== [21:31:35] Prepare: Installing curl...

====== [21:31:37] Prepare: Installing apt-transport-https...

====== [21:31:39] Error: Unsupported OS detected. This upgrade script can only be run on Debian 12 (Bookworm). Current OS version: Debian . Exiting..

But why?

techsupport@GT3CXSBC01:~$ uname -a
Linux GT3CXSBC01 6.1.0-52-amd64 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Debian 6.1.180-1 (2026-08-03) x86_64 GNU/Linux
techsupport@GT3CXSBC01:~$ cat /etc/debian_version
12.15

Strange.

 

[Alejandro_3CX]

Hi @Gavino the line ====== [21:31:33] Starting: Current version: appears completely empty. Because of this, the operating system variable is left blank (Debian .) and the script aborts the installation.

is lsb-release installed?

Keep in mind that the sbcdebian12to13.sh script only works on installations performed from the official 3CX ISO. If by chance you installed a generic Debian on the instance and then added the SBC package manually, the script's system validation check will fail.

If this was a manual installation on top of standard Debian and not from the official 3CX ISO, you will need to deploy a fresh machine using the 3CX ISO.