Debian unattended-upgrades sometimes doesn't work in OpenVZ

black

I noticed that on some openvz containers, Debian's unattended-upgrades don't work and some do. The ones that don't work either have a unattended-upgrades-shutdown.log (that's blank) in /var/log/var/log/unattended-upgrades or just an empty directory for /var/log/unattended-upgrades. Some VMs have 512 MB of dedicated RAM that don't work and I have ones with only 128 MB of RAM that work (so I'm pretty sure it's not a memory issue). Has anyone else experienced issue, or better yet, have a solution to the problem?

rds100

Are you sure the automatic updates are enabled? By default they are not. Run dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades and see.

black

@rds100 said:
Are you sure the automatic updates are enabled? By default they are not. Run dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades and see.

They should be enabled. After running apt-get install unattended-upgrades, I added

// Enable the update/upgrade script (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::Enable "1";

// Do "apt-get update" automatically every n-days (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";

// Do "apt-get upgrade --download-only" every n-days (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";

// Run the "unattended-upgrade" security upgrade script
// every n-days (0=disabled)
// Requires the package "unattended-upgrades" and will write
// a log in /var/log/unattended-upgrades
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

// Do "apt-get autoclean" every n-days (0=disable)
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";

in /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/02periodic

I've used the same setup for ~20 different VMs with various providers, about 10 of them work and the other ones don't

Edit: Nothing in syslog either.

Edit2: The broken OpenVZ VMs are on different kernel verisons (so I don't think it's ovz kernel related).

colm

Maybe check if /etc/cron.daily/apt is missing. Broken OpenVZ templates are unfortunately very common.

See: http://serverfault.com/questions/568326/how-to-recreate-etc-cron-daily-apt

MuZo

I usually do dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades to enable autorun, not sure if it changes something

black

colm said: Maybe check if /etc/cron.daily/apt is missing. Broken OpenVZ templates are unfortunately very common.

See: http://serverfault.com/questions/568326/how-to-recreate-etc-cron-daily-apt

Thanks. /etc/cron.daily/apt appears to exist in all the OpenVZ nodes, but I followed the tutorial and reconfigured one.

MuZo said: I usually do dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades to enable autorun, not sure if it changes something

I'll run this as well on a different node to see if it fixes things. Thanks.

4n0nx

black said: I've used the same setup for ~20 different VMs with various providers, about 10 of them work and the other ones don't

Same. It worked with OVH but then I switched to other providers and it didn't. What seems to work on all VPS's is this:

http://tech.tiq.cc/2014/08/how-to-automatically-install-updates-on-linux-debian/

Installing ALL updates (not only security) only seems to work for me if I run "unattended-upgrade" once after having configured everything.

CharlesA

I haven't had unattended-upgrades not work for me on the three VPSes I have running Debian.

I seem to recall apticron not working right on a couple of them, but that was due to /etc/cron.daily/apt being not set to executable.