Upgrades past 11.30 are blocked by Exim version.

Sometimes when upgrading older versions of cPanel, you may encounter one of cPanel’s upgrade blockers in a way that isn’t anticipated. Last week, I encountered that exact situation in attempting to upgrade a server that was running 11.30, and was ready to be updated to the current version, which is 11.44, and saw this error:

Upgrades past 11.30 are blocked because your exim is older than 4.70 and eximup is disabled.

Prior to the upgrade, I had set the cPanel update configuration to the ‘Current’ tier, and confirmed that all of the software was allowed to be upgraded by cPanel:

# cat /etc/cpupdate.conf
BANDMINUP=inherit
BSDPORTS=yes
COURIERUP=inherit
CPANEL=current
DOVECOTUP=inherit
EXIMUP=inherit
FTPUP=inherit
MYSQLUP=inherit
NSDUP=inherit
PYTHONUP=inherit
RPMUP=daily
SARULESUP=daily
SYSUP=daily
UPDATES=daily

Sadly, no matter what I tried to trick cPanel into upgrading, it just wouldn’t go. The solution was to set the CPANEL version to just one version newer than the server was. In this case, I needed to set it to 11.32

cat /etc/cpupdate.conf
BANDMINUP=inherit
BSDPORTS=yes
COURIERUP=inherit
CPANEL=11.32
DOVECOTUP=inherit
EXIMUP=inherit
FTPUP=inherit
MYSQLUP=inherit
NSDUP=inherit
PYTHONUP=inherit
RPMUP=daily
SARULESUP=daily
SYSUP=daily
UPDATES=daily

Once the update to 11.32 completed, I updated the version to 11.34, and then 11.36. Once we hit 11.36, I was able to switch the version back to the ‘Current’ tier, and the update completed successfully.