Upgrade from 2.27.9 LTS to 2.33.0 LTS fails with BoltDB error

[saboromeo]

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Hi,

I’m trying to upgrade Portainer in my Swarm cluster.
Current version: 2.27.8 LTS
Upgraded to: 2.27.9 LTS → worked fine
Upgrade attempt: 2.27.9 LTS → 2.33.0 LTS → fails

When starting Portainer after the upgrade, I get this error:

github.com/portainer/portainer/api/database/boltdb/db.go:133 > loading PortainerDB | filename=portainer.db
panic: assertion failed: Page expected to be: 261, but self identifies as 7018141226993659005

Environment
Setup: Docker Swarm cluster
Nodes: 9 (3 managers, 6 workers)
Storage: Portainer data (/data) stored on an NFS server (mounted volume)

Question
Does anyone know how to solve this problem?
Is it possible to upgrade directly from 2.27.9 LTS to 2.33.0 LTS, or do I need to go through intermediate versions?
Could this be related to BoltDB corruption or incompatibility?

Thanks in advance for any help

[Nick-Portainer]

Hello @saboromeo can you please provide the following.

• How are you running the upgrade for Portainer?
• What version of NFS are you using?
• Docker Version on all nodes
• What Operating System/Distribution are you using?

[saboromeo]

I’m happy to answer your questions:

All VMs are running Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS. Additionally, Docker version 28.3.3 is running on the Linux machines, and the NFS server is on version v3.

Portainer is executed with the command docker stack deploy -c portainer-agent-stack.yaml portainer (the version in the YAML file is adjusted beforehand). There was also an attempt to stop Portainer using the command docker service update --replicas 0 portainer_portainer and then execute the stack command, but that also did not work.

New Info:
We also tried to start Portainer locally without NFS, so the data would reside on the Swarm Manager. That didn't work either. We wanted to rule out the possibility that it was an NFS-related issue.

What did work was updating from version 2.27.9 LTS to version 2.31.3 STS. However, as soon as we tried to update to 2.32.0 or higher, we encountered the same problem.