Re: unattended-upgrades by default?
On Fri, Nov 04, 2016 at 10:51:15PM +0200, Adrian Bunk wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 03, 2016 at 06:47:28PM +0000, Steve McIntyre wrote:
> >...
> > * it will be a different experience compared to what people will get
> > when installing Debian normally, using d-i / debootstrap. Most
> > (all?) of our desktop environments already have some automatic
> > notification of available updates, but (a) not everybody uses them;
> > and (b) that's not so useful on a remote server installation where
> > there's no desktop for the system to show a pop-up or similar.
> >...
>
> Should Debian also default to automatically reboot?
Based on what Windows admins and users say, it would be a terrible decision,
leading to unexpected data loss, when your computer reboots while you have
unsaved state. And you can't say "reboot when no one is logged on" as GUI
users don't log out anymore.
Restarting a single daemon is in a vast majority of cases safe. It might
harm a fallover scheme, and certain clients (for example, SQL ones -- a
non-buggy one must be always prepared to restart a transaction, but losing
a temporary table might be unexpected); for most, though, a momentary loss
of service is transparent to users. Kernel reboots, not so.
> If the answer is "no", then nothing is a solution that does not also
> solve how to notify the user when a new security update of the kernel
> was automatically installed on his remote server.
Servers are expected to have a MTA or a monitoring system for that. For GUI
systems there are new-fangled notifications because someone had a problem
with good old "You have new mail." upon opening a terminal (and some new
users, ignoring all that is holy, might even not open that terminal at all,
bastards!), but _some_ form of notification is expected.
Forced reboot on upgrade is damage. Let's learn from errors of others.
Meow!
--
A MAP07 (Dead Simple) raspberry tincture recipe: 0.5l 95% alcohol, 1kg
raspberries, 0.4kg sugar; put into a big jar for 1 month. Filter out and
throw away the fruits (can dump them into a cake, etc), let the drink age
at least 3-6 months.
Reply to: