Reduce technical debt & increase timeout

[andreeaflorescu]

Summary of the PR

We were using a rather outdated version. Moving to the latest available one. There are some other things that need fixing and I am looking at addressing in this PR, hence for now this is WIP.

Requirements

Before submitting your PR, please make sure you addressed the following requirements:

• [X] All commits in this PR are signed (with git commit -s), and the commit message has max 60 characters for the summary and max 75 characters for each description line.
• [x] All added/changed functionality has a corresponding unit/integration test.
• [x] All added/changed public-facing functionality has entries in the "Upcoming Release" section of CHANGELOG.md (if no such section exists, please create one).
• [x] Any newly added unsafe code is properly documented.

[andreeaflorescu]

Another thing that I want to do before merging this is to publish a new container version to update the base image from Ubuntu 18.04 to ubuntu 22.

[andreeaflorescu]

Another thing that I want to do before merging this is to publish a new container version to update the base image from Ubuntu 18.04 to ubuntu 22.

This will take longer than anticipated, so I would propose just merging this once we get the hosts in order as well.