Re: Question on Unattended Upgrades
On 5/12/20 09:05, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Tuesday 12 May 2020 10:30:04 Celejar wrote:
>
>> On Tue, 12 May 2020 06:03:52 -0400
>>
>> Gene Heskett <gheskett@shentel.net> wrote:
>>> On Tuesday 12 May 2020 05:07:04 l0f4r0@tuta.io wrote:
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> 12 mai 2020 à 08:22 de keifer.bly@gmail.com:
>>>>> Is there a way to configure it to automatically restart when a
>>>>> package that needs to be restarted is upgraded?
>>>>
>>>> I think 'Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot "true";' should do
>>>> it in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades. If I were you, I
>>>> would check /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades as well because
>>>> those are the 2 most important configuration files for
>>>> unattended-upgrades.
>>>>
>>>> Best regards,
>>>> l0f4r0
>>>
>>> I can see a major disaster in the making, what if that reboot was
>>> commanded in the middle of your nightly backup run, leaving your
>>> backup program with a totally bogus database it cannot recover from?
>>
>> That would be unfortunate - but surely a serious backup program would
>> be designed to be robust enough that ending up "with a totally bogus
>> database it cannot recover from" should never happen? What if you
>> have some sort of system crash during a backup? Do you have a specific
>> backup system in mind?
>
> You are trying to justify an automatic reboot, very bad idea. Granted,
> most such would be ok, and will leave a requester popup to advise the
> admin, doing its normal routine in the meantime.
>
> I happen to use amanda to backup 5 machines here, but any backup suite
> that maintains a recovery database is going to be in deep doodoo if it
> gets rebooted in the middle of a backup. I probably do better than most
> but a worst case scenario here if everything in place works, would only
> lose me that days data because I do keep separate copies of that data.
> But 60 days of that is 33GB, the biggest single entry in my nearly 70
> items long list.
>
I don't know about Amanda other than understanding it to be a commercial
quality backup system. In my working days as an administrator, my
organization used HP Data Protector (now Micro Focus). As I recall, it
had a proprietary transactional database that should have been up to
date as of the last successfully completed file backups before a crash.
It also, at least in our usage, backed up its database as the first
action in a cycle, so in the worst case, reloading the database and
rerunning the faulted backup would restore synchronization of the
database and data. And if all else failed, I think there were procedures
for rebuilding the database from the tapes. I wonder if Amanda does not
provide similar features.
We also did not do automatic updates, there being organizational
requirements to test configuration changes before installing them on
production systems.
I don't consider automatic updates a very good idea, although out of
laziness in retirement I allow automatic security updates. Unplanned
reboots seem an even worse idea inasmuch as they occasionally will
either fail or affect system function. (Updating without rebooting also
may do that, of course).
>>> Frankly the update shouldn't be allowed if your backup is actually
>>> running. So it might be safer to schedule the update and reboot if
>>> needed before the backup starts. That means one cron driven script
>>> does it all in the sequence desired.
With respect, I would run the backup first and schedule upgrades and
possible reboots to follow, and perhaps depend on success of, the backup.
Regards,
Tom Dial
>
> Cheers, Gene Heskett
>
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