I had an interesting, and slightly irritating, set of issues with two docker installations on two different hosts. I thought I’d note them here as I’m sure I’ll need to refer back to at least one of them in the future.

Docker too old

One of my docker hosts threw an error Error response from daemon: client version 1:42 is too old, which was a little puzzling as I had just updated the system. it turns out the answer is in this stack overflow thread. Essentially the system, for some unknown reason, had two versions of docker compose installed. Running this command:

# Source - https://stackoverflow.com/a
# Posted by til
# Retrieved 2025-11-23, License - CC BY-SA 4.0

ls -l /usr/libexec/docker/cli-plugins \
      /usr/local/lib/docker/cli-plugins \
      /usr/share/docker/cli-plugins \
      ~/.docker/cli-plugins

listed two locations showing docker compose binaries and their dates. The one located at ~/.docker/cli-plugins was several years old…and probably taking precedence over the other. So, rather than moving the binary, I renamed it to see if that was the issue with mv ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose ~/.docker/cli-plugins/docker-compose.bak and, et voila, issue solved. The newer version was utilised by docker compose commands.

Docker too new

Now onto my other host and the perennial favourite for breaking for no good reason…Nextcloud. I know a lot of people are over this software, citing it as bloated and slow. It’s sort of all those things. My household knows my love-hate history with this software because if i’ve said something is broken, the assumption is Nextcloud. I originally had an install on a VM, which it turns out was super masochistic because things broke ALL THE TIME. Then I moved to a docker install, which improved things greatly for severaly years…until it didn’t and it borked beyond repair. This led me to try the AIO installation method, which was annoying and opinionated, but it worked. I even found it faster than the previous install.

…Until today! One apt update && apt upgrade on the host and suddenly the nextcloud master container web updater page is showing Slim Application Error. Excellent…

It was somewhat heartening to see that several people had suffered the same error on the nextcloud github page. This thread gave me the answer I needed for now.

It turns out they appear to have hardcoded an earlier version of docker. This meant that I had to rollback to a previous version to get the updater to work. This was particularly important, because even if they fixed the issue in the next release (it looks like it’s in the beta branch at the moment), there was no way for nextcloud to update itself with the installed version of docker!

So, I checked which versions of docker were available for my ubuntu jammy install with apt-cache madison docker-ce-cli and apt-cache madison docker-ce.

Then I removed the new versions:

sudo apt remove docker-ce docker-ce-cli

Installed the old versions:

sudo apt install docker-ce=5:28.5.2-1~ubuntu.22.04~jammy docker-ce-cli=5:28.5.2-1~ubuntu.22.04~jammy

And set apt to hold the docker version at the older one I just installed:

sudo apt-mark hold docker-ce docker-ce-cli

I’ll have to keep an eye on the nextcloud github thread linked above for the fixes to make their way into the latest versions of docker. Once they are there I can run sudo apt-mark unhold docker-ce docker-ce-cli and update docker to the latest version.