How often do you update software on your servers?
How often do you update software on your servers?
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
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, that was not there before lol.
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.
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 upgrade
Is there any reason to not combine the commands since the output always prompts prior to changes anyway?
Every night at ~ 12-1am
unattended updates / transactional-update are awesome.
Stuff has been running for years, and it’s still up to date.
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.
unattended-upgrades and reboot from time to time to get the latest Kernel version.
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.gz
The main configuration file is /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades, maybe you put your config in the wrong place?
here is mine
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.
Gentooer here. Emerge sync &; world daily at night.
Weekly a manual check for stuff that doesn’t autoupdate for reasons.
Monthly / biweekly podman compose pull for containers. Manual, because i don’t trust that kind of autoupdate.
Using nix :P
I update the flake every now and then via nix flake updated and then do a rebuild
All systems, daily via a single ansible script. That’s apt update, upgrade and reboot if needed (some systems set to only reboot with a separate script so I can handle them separately).
Rarely have any sort of problems.
On my ubuntu I use unattended updates but that doesn’t work reliably. I have to update it manually most of the time. Once every other month.
On my fedora server it auto updates every day at 4 reliably.
The next server is going to be atomic such that the server restart is even shorter (not that I would care about it at 4).
All services are dockerized, updated nightly.
Server OS runs a kernel-patch service for real time exploit patching.
All other updates as soon as they appear.
Yeah, sometimes I'll need to go in a repair - but that's way better than having to clean up after having been exploited due to not keeping up on security patches.
On Alpine Linux I update my two Pi servers at 2 in the morning daily. It’s simpler compared to Debian which needs unattended-updates. Just add apk update && apk upgrade to a cron job and you’re good to go.
I only have three docker services which is simple enough to update manually.
I like to keep things as simple as possible for my already chaotic brain.
My web facing server has just enough packages installed to (kinda securely) host a Caddy and Kiwix docker container to work with my domain name and make a comfortable work environment through SSH. My Pi for my HomeAssistant docker container has less because it’s locked down to just my local network.
I also wrote my own install scripts so reinstalling everything and getting it back to a running state would take about 15 minutes for each device.
And I also wrote my own backup/restore scripts that evolved over 3/4 of a year. I use them often so I have confidence in those scripts.
I personally don’t really care too much. I have multiple ways of dealing with issues for something that’s a hobby to me. Which is why I stick to simplicity.
I’m sure this is a thing for people to worry about when dealing with more complex setups. I just wanna vibe out in my tiny corner of the internet.
apk -U upgrade
apk seems to have some tricks in there that aren’t as well known.
I managed to catch in the IRC channel that apk add doc will automatically download any related man pages for packages with any future downloads through apk. That made life a bit more convenient instead of downloading all those packages separately.
Depends, on how critical something is…since we deal with servers / customers at work that often are purposely not adjusted for years…because introducing a different behaviour (even if better) would grind production to a halt, I take a not careful approach.
I was using OpenSUSE Leap, and with zypper you can review which patches are available, whether they are critical or run recommended or not needed. You can then apply which specific patch you want be CVE if necessary.
But with Leap’s path seaming messy at the moment, I moved to Tumbleweed, since you have snapshotying built in. If an update did mess something up you just rollback to the previous snapshot and in less than a minute it is fixed
everyday to once a month, depending how often I use the server
IME usually waiting longer to apply larger updates causes more issues than smaller and more frequent ones