The last Ceph Squid patch is not in your Proxmox repository

Yesterday, 12 October, the Ceph project shipped 19.2.7. It is the seventh backport in the Squid series, and the release note opens the way they all do: "We recommend that all deployments update to this release".

This afternoon we checked what the Proxmox repository actually serves. The highest version of the ceph package in ceph-squid for Debian 13 is 19.2.6-pve4, and that repository's index is dated 9 September. The Squid series has its end of support set for 31 October: eighteen days from now.

Those three sentences do not contradict each other. They describe two different calendars, and yours is run by the second one.

The measurement, with a timestamp on it

This is what was there on 13 October 2026 at 15:06 UTC, read from the indexes Proxmox publishes. We write the time down because it is perishable: if you are reading this a week later, check again — that is what the commands at the end are for.

• ceph-squid / trixie (Debian 13, the one for Proxmox VE 9): 19.2.6-pve4 in both no-subscription and test. Index dated 9 September, 00:12 UTC.
• ceph-squid / bookworm (Debian 12, the one for Proxmox VE 8): 19.2.5 in no-subscription and 19.2.6 in test. Index dated 5 September.
• ceph-tentacle / trixie: 20.2.4-pve5. Index dated 10 October, 23:16 UTC. Under three days old.
• Searching for the string 19.2.7 across the four Squid indexes (two distributions times two components): zero hits.

A Debian repository index is regenerated every time a package lands. The fact that Squid's has not moved in thirty-four days means, fairly reliably, that nothing has landed there since 9 September. Upstream, meanwhile, has shipped twice: 19.2.6 on 19 August and 19.2.7 yesterday.

What we are NOT saying

We are not saying Proxmox has abandoned the repository. That package's suffix is -pve4: -pve1, -pve2 and -pve3 all exist too, four in-house rebuilds of the same 19.2.6. That is work done on that repository. Nor are we saying 19.2.7 will never arrive: it could land tomorrow, and we hope it does.

What we are saying is duller and more useful: the Ceph version you run is decided by whoever packages it, and that is a different project, with different priorities and a different rhythm. Tentacle has been the default since Proxmox VE 9.2. That its index was rebuilt this week while Squid's has sat still for five weeks says a fair amount about where the attention is right now, and it is a public signal that costs nothing to check.

An estimate with the name of a date

As we wrote back in September, the field in that file is called target_eol and today it holds 2026-10-31 for Squid and 2027-06-01 for Tentacle. Back then that value had moved 42 days with no announcement at all; the commit detail is in the commit that moved the date 42 days with no announcement. It may move again, and if it does it is doing you a favour. The gap between the version you run and the version that exists does not move on its own.

And here is the uncomfortable part of the arithmetic. Even if Proxmox ships 19.2.7 next week, the branch runs out of backports on the 31st all the same. The question that matters is how many days you will spend on a dead branch after that date, and that depends on when you can make the jump to Tentacle in your own shop, with your own windows and your own people.

The second finding: two components, two versions

On Debian 12 — that is, on any cluster still running Proxmox VE 8 — the no-subscription repository serves 19.2.5 and test serves 19.2.6. A whole point release apart, decided by one line in your sources.list that you probably wrote two years ago and have not read since.

Nobody should move to test because of this — it is called that for a reason. What is worth having is knowing which lane you are in before you promise anyone an upgrade date.

Three checks, five minutes

What follows runs on a cluster node and changes nothing. If you only do one thing with this article, do this.

1. What your daemons are actually running

ceph versions

It returns a count by version for each daemon type. That is not the same as the installed package: a mon or an osd that has not been restarted is still running the old binary even if apt says everything is current. If two different versions show up here, you have a half-finished upgrade, and that comes before everything else.

2. What your repository is offering you

apt-get update && apt-cache policy ceph-common

The Installed line and the Candidate line. If they match, it does not mean you are current: it means your repository has nothing else to give you. That distinction is exactly the one that disappears when you look at the dashboard and see everything green.

3. When it last moved

curl -s http://download.proxmox.com/debian/ceph-squid/dists/trixie/Release | grep ^Date:

Swap ceph-squid for ceph-tentacle and trixie for bookworm as appropriate. That date is the most direct public signal of whether your branch is still getting work. Compare it against the release list on ceph.io and you have your answer without asking anyone's permission.

The jump, and in what order

If the conclusion is that you need to move to Tentacle, the order is not optional and is worth knowing before you open the window. Proxmox's own 8-to-9 upgrade guide says it in those words: you must take the cluster to Ceph 19.2 Squid before you start the upgrade to Proxmox VE 9.0. Then you upgrade Proxmox, and only then do you jump from Squid to Tentacle; that last jump requires Proxmox VE 9.1 or newer, with pve-manager 9.1.4 and Ceph packages 19.2.3-pve3 onwards. We worked through this crossed calendar in Ceph's calendar against Proxmox's.

In other words: if you are on Proxmox VE 8 with Squid today, there is not one window between you and Tentacle, there are three. Eighteen days is very little room to chain them sensibly, so the honest move is to accept that you will cross 31 October on a branch with no backports and decide that deliberately, with the date written down, instead of discovering it in January. A three-node cluster, on top of that, survives losing one node but does not heal itself in the meantime — a three-node Ceph does not heal itself, it holds on — and that narrows the room for improvising quite a lot.

If you cross the 31st without being able to jump

This will happen to plenty of people, and it is not the end of the world. Losing a branch's support means one concrete thing: fixes that appear from then on are written for Tentacle and nobody carries them back. The cluster works exactly the same on 1 November as it did on 30 October. What changes is that the floor stops rising.

What does change is what you are entitled to call "current". From the 31st onwards, the version you have installed is a ceiling rather than a waypoint. It is worth writing down somewhere what that exact ceiling is — not "Squid", but 19.2.6-pve4 or whatever yours turns out to be — and the date it stopped moving, because that is the figure you will need the day somebody asks about a specific bug. And it is worth checking the index now and then: if 19.2.7 shows up before the 31st, it is free and it is the last train.

What stays on the record

An end of support has two halves. The upstream half, which appears in release notes and everyone reads. And the packager's half, which appears nowhere and is the one that actually decides which binary boots on your node tonight. The first is announced. The second is measured — with a curl.

19.2.7 has existed since yesterday. Today it is not there. Go check yours.

Sources (checked 13 Oct 2026): the 19.2.7 date and the sentence "We recommend that all deployments update to this release" come from the v19.2.7 Squid release note on ceph.io. The release dates and the target_eol values — 2026-10-31 for Squid, 2027-06-01 for Tentacle — come from doc/releases/releases.yml in the Ceph repository and from the documentation's releases page. The package versions and index dates are our own measurement, taken on 13 Oct 2026 at 15:06 UTC by reading the public Release and Packages.gz files on download.proxmox.com; anyone can repeat it with the command in point 3, and if you are reading this later the result will have changed. The Tentacle upgrade requirements and the upgrade order from 8.4 come from Proxmox documentation and announcements. We have not run 19.2.7 in production: there is no performance or stability measurement here, only package availability.