How to Unlock a Proxmox LXC Container

While I was backing up a few containers in Proxmox today, one of them became unresponsive. I tried to cancel the backup but it just became locked. Restarting the server didn’t help, so after browsing the Proxmox support forms, I found the following solution detailed below.

First, we’ll list the status of the containers.

pct list

It will show a list of containers and their status.

VMID       Status     Lock         Name                
100        stopped    Locked       DNS Server     
101        running                 Network Shares         
102        running                 Linux

Next, we could try stopping and manually unlocking the container with the following commands below.

qm stop <VM ID>
qm unlock <VM ID>

But, if that doesn’t work, try the following command.

pct unlock <VM ID>

And after running those commands, my container was back up and running.