This week as I had some downtime after PyCon Canada, I started working on resolving all the issues that I postponed. One of these issues involved applying security updates to my Linode server and rebooting the server. However when I did so… I noticed that the Rookeries site went down. When I logged into the server, I quickly found the problem: Docker refused to start after the kernel updates.

As this bug report on Docker for Linux says, there is an issue with the latest Linode kernel when it comes to OverlayFS.

This causes the containerdservice that docker-ce is dependent on to not start. When looking at the logs (using sudo journalctl -xe), you’ll see an error along the lines of:

modprobe: ERROR: ../libkmod/libkmod.c:514 lookup_builtin_file() could not open builtin file '/lib/modules/4.18.16-x86_64-linode118/modules.builtin.bin'
modprobe: FATAL: Module overlay not found in directory /lib/modules/4.18.16-x86_64-linode118)

Thankfully there is a workaround to resolve this problem. From the instructions you need to an override configuration for the containerd service:

$ mkdir -p /etc/systemd/system/containerd.service.d/
$ cat << EOF > /etc/systemd/system/containerd.service.d/override.conf [Service]
ExecStartPre=
EOF
$ systemctl reload
$ systemctl restart docker

Anyways, I hope this helps if you run into the same situation.