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
Mine is set to update all the stuff I use, and the OS, automatically whenever an update is available. 🤷♂️
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).
Every couple of days. I don’t auto-update, but I’ve streamlined the process to the point that I can just open a single web page and see the number of pending updates for every system on my network, docker containers included, each one with a button. Clicking the button applies the update and reboots if necessary. So it takes about 15 seconds of effort to update everything, which is why I don’t mind doing it so often.
maybe like once in 3 months. i usually update when i need to setup something new on the server that needs to install new packages.
Weekly. Cronjob.
Monthly unless I learn about a vulnerability that would require it sooner.
I run Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS with k3s. I update my container versions every few months, though not everything I’m running all at once. I update the actual system packages via apt maybe once a year and end up nuking and re-installing everything every couple years on average. I deliberately block all inbound WAN traffic in my firewall and use k8s network policies to aggressively limit egress WAN connections because I’m aware that I’m bad about keeping things up to date.
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.
podman quadlets with auto updates running on opensuse microos
im not yet self hosting a ton of services tho
Almost everything I have runs Debian or NixOS, so……… once a month? Except for VMs I’m playing around with, which usually get updated every time I log into them, or instal stuff.
Using nix :P
I update the flake every now and then via nix flake updated and then do a rebuild
Every night at ~ 12-1am
unattended updates / transactional-update are awesome.
Stuff has been running for years, and it’s still up to date.
This guy scares me
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.
This is the way! At least install security upgrades nightly using
unattended-upgradesand 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.gzThe main configuration file is
/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades, maybe you put your config in the wrong place?here is mine
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)
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.
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?
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.
Once a week. I have a bash script that does an apt update upgrade and pulls new docker images.
