Thankyou Ralph, Daniel and the others who responded. I am happy to report that I built my server today. The provider doesn't offer a Trixie installation yet, so I started with Bookworm, installed usrmerge, then upgraded to Trixie and then Excalibur.



It was basically problem-free, the only part that was a little tricky was getting rid of systemd which required me to first force delete systemd-sysv which also deleted some other possibly important packages involving pam plugins and such, but I decided they were not essential enough to crash the session and I was right. So then I could install sysvinit and sysvinit-core and then I think I rebooted before removing and purging systemd. It was a bit nerve wracking but it came up okay running sysvinit, even though I never actually set it to use sysvinit instead of systemd and both were present.



One strange thing that happened was it seemed to lose network-manager, or perhaps the provider hadn't installed network-manager on their image -- it was unfortunate that I didn't explore the network configuration prior to the upgrade. Anyway, it came up with no network, and after an hour or two trying to figure out the magic incantations of ip address, ip link and ip route I eventually had the idea of running "sudo dhclient eth0" and this got me back online :) Then I created a basic /etc/network/interfaces and installed the ifupdown package for a permanent fix.



So far, the server seems to be running well!



Kind regards, Nick



P.S. Thinking about it some more I think I know what happened -- the debian docs seemed to imply that systemd has now swallowed network-manager, so probably it was using systemd's network-manager before. Definitely a thing to be aware of!