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
- Every day or at least once a week. Should automate it. 
- Only mostly when I want to. Which tends to be on Mondays and Saturdays. - I’m running Sid on servers, so automatic updates are actually a risk. Used to be Debian Stable, but maaan the docker and podman improvements… make me drool. 
- Automatic daily updates for system packages. Automatic daily container updates with watchtower. I normally have things pinned to a reasonable major or minor release, so I do manual upgrades for new OS release branches and usually pin to a major version for Docker containers but depends on the container. 
- Monthly unless I learn about a vulnerability that would require it sooner. 
- When something doesn’t work. I.e. when an app update causes incompatibility with a service. I think I have one server that’s a few years without an update (distro version may actually be EOL for all I know). - Why probably so may unpatched issues. - Ain’t broke and I can’t be bothered to update. Not accessible publicly either. It also runs some software with very specific and brittle dependencies and I don’t care to risk breaking it. If distro is EOL (probably is) then it’d be a pretty time consuming getting everything set up again. 
 
 
- 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? - 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. 
 
 
- 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 
- 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.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 
 
- Tell me you’re using nightly builds as well. 
- 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. 
 
- my nixos containers and the podman containers inside them update nightly around 03:00 
- Whenever I ssh into it. 
- 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. 
 
- Apt update and upgrade happen automatically. 
- If I have something serious, I will set up automatic upgrades. If short downtimes are ok, also with automatic reboots when the kernel updates, but if they are not, with notifications that I should go reboot them. - If it’s not anything serious, whenever I remember to. 
- 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. 
- 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) 
 
- 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? - No, my home server. My desktop and laptop both have arch, because I do interact with them more often. 
 
 
 
- 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. 
 
- When I remember. About once a month. - Same here. No auto updates, no touching of a stable system without my manual intervention. 😅 - Last thing I need in my life is a broken system at home when I don’t have time for it! 
 
 








