Or asked the other way around: How long do you keep your servers running without installing any software updates?
update means something like
sudo dnf update
or something …
apt-get upgrade
apt-get update
Automatic daily updates for system packages. Automatic daily container updates with watchtower. I normally have things pinned to a reasonable major or minor release, so I do manual upgrades for new OS release branches and usually pin to a major version for Docker containers but depends on the container.
Only mostly when I want to. Which tends to be on Mondays and Saturdays.
I’m running Sid on servers, so automatic updates are actually a risk. Used to be Debian Stable, but maaan the docker and podman improvements… make me drool.
When something doesn’t work. I.e. when an app update causes incompatibility with a service. I think I have one server that’s a few years without an update (distro version may actually be EOL for all I know).
my nixos containers and the podman containers inside them update nightly around 03:00
Monthly unless I learn about a vulnerability that would require it sooner.
Apt update and upgrade happen automatically.
If I have something serious, I will set up automatic upgrades. If short downtimes are ok, also with automatic reboots when the kernel updates.
If it’s not anything serious, whenever I remember to.
Daily on my Gentoo server, through a Cronjob every morning. It’s a custom script though, so there’s more than just doing an emerge update. It’ll send me ntfy notifications for the update results, if there are new news items, and if there are any time config merge updates to make. A few other things as well but that’s the main stuff.
Other servers, typically weekly or only manually when I ssh into them (for the ones I don’t really feel the need to update frequently).
Whenever I ssh into it.
Those apt commands are in a less-good order. It’s usually better to update apt, then upgrade the system.
I upgrade as soon as reasonably possible after the notification appears, if the system isn’t on auto-upgrade.
I do
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgradeIs there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?
I think their point was to make sure they are done in order, i.e. update before upgrade, not the other way around as in OPs example.
Every night at ~ 12-1am
unattended updates / transactional-update are awesome.
Stuff has been running for years, and it’s still up to date.
I wish I could use unattended-upgrade.
It literally restarts my server even when I disable the option, leaving it hung if the USB boot key isn’t in there.
I had to stop using it, so now I just manually upgrade because that doesn’t auto-restart without my permission…
unattended-upgrades doesn’t do that unless you explicitly specify
Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "true";in the config. Check/usr/share/doc/unattended-upgrades/README.md.gzThe main configuration file is
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades, maybe you put your config in the wrong place?here is mine
Tell me you’re using nightly builds as well.
This guy scares me
This is the way! At least install security upgrades nightly using
unattended-upgradesand reboot from time to time to get the latest Kernel version.Once per week for me. Works really great on openSUSE MicroOS. Had to roll back maybe a couple of times the last few years.
That said, I run basically everything in containers so the OS installed things are lean.
Yum-cron. Daily. Rolling bounce on a schedule.
It has been rock-solid for 20 years, but lennart’s cancer and the growing amount of shite they’re shoveling into EL has caused a few issues here and there with 7, 9 and 10. (Skipped 8 because f that)
But, today, it works. So that’s year 23 and 8 months.
Unattended-upgrade does security-only patching once every 4 hours (in rough sync with my local mirror)
Full upgrades are done weekly, accompanied by a reboot
I find that the split between security patching and feature/bug patching maintains a healthy balance knowing when something is likely to break but never being behind on the latest cve.
For me, unattended-upgrade does it’s thing. Updating other packages happens whenever I think about it. Very few things are not containerized and there’s very little added beyond the base Debian install, so when I do update its maybe a dozen packages.
I would previously reboot during thunderstorms if we lost power, but now that I’ve got a UPS I probably ought to come up with a different plan.
When I remember. About once a month.
Same here. No auto updates, no touching of a stable system without my manual intervention. 😅
Last thing I need in my life is a broken system at home when I don’t have time for it!
Well, one of the reasons I’m using debian on my server is so I can kinda forget about it…
I’ll update maybe once a month, or every couple months. I don’t always restart though, so my kernel is probably a bit behind :'D
I use Debian stable and subscribe to the debian-security-announce mailing list, so I update each time I get an email from it.
This is the way. (At least for a server)
That’s… Not how it works… Debian is “stable” not “secure”. You use Debian so that is easier to run updates frequently since they’ll be unlikely to break things.
If I wanted to run updates frequently I would run arch lmao. Even if I did apt update every day, debian stable doesn’t get that many updates.
I could just run auto-update but meh.
If I wanted to run updates frequently I would run arch lmao. Even if I did apt update every day, debian stable doesn’t get that many updates.
You’re not updating for features you’re updating for bug and security fixes. That’s why Debian stable doesn’t have many updates. But the ones they do are typically important.
Yeah, I know. Until I get ransomware’d and my nudes leaked, I won’t care 💅🏻✨
Clearly you don’t know.
I guess people smoke because they don’t know smoking causes cancer ;3
Are you talking about desktop use?
No, my home server. My desktop and laptop both have arch, because I do interact with them more often.
lol. Same issue for me. I run it for months, and surprisingly (for me) nothing breaks at all.
But fucking ssh shows warnings regarding some “post quantum crypto” stuff; recommending software update, that was not there before lol.
