Step 1.) Upgrade to Debian 11 first
The process to go to Debian 12 is not as smooth as 11, when trying to upgrade from Debian 10. In fact, it doesn't work directly, so you'll first need to follow this guide to update to Debian 11, reboot and come back here if successful.
Step 2.) Update sources.list
Update your /etc/apt/sources.list like this:
deb http://........
Jan 16 04:02:03 centosbox syslogd 1.4.1: restart.
Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: INFO: task updatedb:20771 blocked for more than 300 seconds.
Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: "echo 0 > /proc/sys/kernel/hung_task_timeout_secs" disables this message.
Jan 16 04:07:34 centosbox kernel: updatedb D F78BE050 6476 20771 20766&n........
yum exits in the middle
The problem is this VPS seems to be an OpenVZ template from HyperVM. The only way to make it work was to disable i386 packages since this was an x64 kernel. That shouldn't be necessary but it was the only way to make yum stop quitting after the first package or two. I couldn't find any issue by checking the logs either.
echo y|yum install vim-minimal telnet expect jwhois net-tools slocate iptables elinks gawk
L........