UPDATE (October 2026): this is a PVE 6 / Debian buster note from 2019. It is left here as a historical record because the shape of the fix hasn’t changed, but the specifics have.
Everything below refers to Proxmox VE 6 and Debian buster. Buster is end-of-life, and on current Proxmox (VE 8/9) these instructions don’t apply:
pve-enterprise.listwas replaced by the deb822.sourcesformat — on VE 9 thermin step 1 silently deletes nothing useful.ftp.au.debian.orgwas retired in favour ofdeb.debian.org; release names have moved buster → bullseye → bookworm → trixie.security.debian.orgis nowdebian-security.
For current releases, use the official source: Proxmox — Package Repositories. The principle still holds — disable the enterprise repo, enable pve-no-subscription — but take the exact lines from that page rather than from below.
For those of us using the great OS Proxmox to manage virtualisation one of the first challenges is fixing the default repositories as it will throw errors such as “401 Unauthorised” and “Failed to fetch https://enterprise.proxmox.com/debian/pve/dists/buster/InRelease”
This is caused by Proxmox shipping with some enterprise repositories switched on by default and is fairly quick and easy to resolve for anyone who wants to use the free repositories for development work. Just follow the below two steps. This is based off an install in August 2019 of Proxmox VE6.0-4.
Step 1
Remove the enterprise repository pointer by running “rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/pve-enterprise.list”
Step 2
Edit the main sources list to contain the correct and free repositories which won’t generate any errors. Edit the file /etc/apt/sources.list to match the below content:
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian buster main contrib
deb http://ftp.au.debian.org/debian buster-updates main contrib
# PVE pve-no-subscription repository provided by proxmox.com,
# NOT recommended for production use
deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve buster pve-no-subscription
# security updates
deb http://security.debian.org buster/updates main contribThat’s it! Happy apting.
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