Old blog completely broken, can't migrate, can't even renew SSL

Developer help Installation
1

I’m trying to revive a private Ghost instance, created cca 2017, which ran fine until April 2022. The SSL cert has expired and the cron job failed to renew it. None of the instructions at How to renew default let's encrypt ssl? work:

  • "/etc/letsencrypt"/acme.sh --cron --home "/etc/letsencrypt" dies with Please refer to https://curl.haxx.se/libcurl/c/libcurl-errors.html for error code: 6 Can not init api. (the host can be resolved fine, I can ping it from the server or remotely)
  • ghost setup ssl-renew dies with "You are running an outdated version of Ghost-CLI.
    […] Run npm install -g ghost-cli@latest to upgrade.
  • npm install -g ghost-cli@latest run as root dies with Error: EACCES: permission denied, access '/usr/lib/node_modules/ghost-cli/node_modules/@samverschueren/stream-to-observable'. Run a second time, it croaks with “ENOTDIR: not a directory, open ‘/usr/lib/node_modules/.staging/@types/node-8b9433e3/package.json’”
  • ghost update --v1 warns about running an outdated version of Ghost-CLI, and claims to succeed with “All up to date!”
  • ghost update dies with “Message: You are about to migrate to Ghost 2.0. Your blog is not on the latest Ghost 1.0 version. Help: Instead run “ghost update --v1”.”
# ghost version
Ghost-CLI version: 1.9.9
Ghost version: 2.20.1 (at /var/www/ghost)
# uname -a
Linux override 4.4.0-210-generic #242-Ubuntu SMP Fri Apr 16 09:57:56 UTC 2021 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Is there hope here?