George, all I was asking for was ideas for my situation. I have very little control over my remote leased, unmanaged server. It has no management console access. I was able to log in as root, but found I could not use commands I needed because of the read-only file system.
I am probably going to delete the whole thing and lease a new server. (I do have backups.)
I looked at my records yesterday and see that server has been running for almost 11 years, and it started with Debian 7 as I recall (and was at Debian 11 when it failed).
Sorry for the misunderstanding.