How to stagger automated upgrade?
How to stagger automated upgrade?
I am using unattended-upgrades across multiple servers. I would like package updates to be rolled out gradually, either randomly or to a subset of test/staging machines first. Is there a way to do that for APT on Ubuntu?
An obvious option is to set some machines to update on Monday and the others to update on Wednesday, but that only gives me only weekly updates...
The goal of course is to avoid a Crowdstrike-like situation on my Ubuntu machines.
edit: For example. An updated openssh-server comes out. One fifth of the machines updates that day, another fifth updates the next day, and the rest updates 3 days later.
My suggestion is to use system management tools like Foreman. It has a "content views" mechanism that can do more or less what you want. There's a bunch of other tools like that along the lines of Uyuni. Of course, those tools have a lot of features, so it might be overkill for your case, but a lot of those features will probably end up useful anyway if you have that many hosts.
With the way Debian/Ubuntu APT repos are set up, if you take a copy of
/dists/$DISTRO_VERSIONas downloaded from a mirror at any given moment and serve it to a particular server, that's going to end up withapt update && apt upgradeinstalling those identical versions, provided that the actual package files in/poolare still available. You can set up caching proxies for that.I remember my DIY hodgepodge a decade ago ultimately just being a daily cronjob that pulls in the current distro (let's say
bookworm) and their associated-updatesand-securityrepos from an upstream rsync-capable mirror, then after checking a killswitch and making sure things aren't currently on fire, it doesrsync -rva tier2 tier3; rsync -rva tier1 tier2; rsync -rva upstream/bookworm tier1. Machines are configured to pull and update from tier1 (first 20%)/tier2 (second 20%)/tier3 (rest) appropriately on a regular basis. The files in/poolwere served by apt-cacher-ng, but I don't know if that's still the cool option nowadays (you will need some kind of local caching for those as old files may disappear without notice).Thanks, that sounds like the ideal setup. This solves my problem and I need an APT mirror anyway.
I am probably going to end up with a cronjob similar to yours. Hopefully I can figure out a smart way to share the
poolto avoid download 3 copies from upstream.
Ubuntu only does security updates, no? So that seems like a bad idea.
If you still want to do that, I guess you'd probably need to run your own package mirror, update that on Monday, and then point all the machines to use that in the sources.list and run unattended-upgrades on different days of the week.
Ubuntu only does security updates, no?
No, why do you think that?
run your own package mirror
I think you might be on to something here. I could probably do this with a package mirror, updating it daily and rotating the
staging,production, etc URLs to serve content as old as I want. This would require a bit of scripting but seems very configurable.Thanks for the idea! Can't believe I didn't think of that. It seems so obvious now, I wonder if someone already made it.
Yes, Ubuntu DOES only do security updates. They don't phase major versions of point releases into distro release channels after they have been released. You have no idea what you are talking about in this thread. You need to go do some reading, please. People are trying to help you, and you're just responding by being rude and snarky. The worst snark as well, because you think you are informed and right, and you're just embarrassing yourself and annoying the people trying to help you.
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Using scheduling is not a good option IMO, it's both too slow (some machines will wait a week to upgrade) and too fast (significant part of machines will upgrade right away).
It seems that making APT mirrors at the cadence I want is the best solution, but thanks for the answer.
That's a great idea! Learned something new, thanks.
Use a CI/CD pipeline with a one box and preprod and run service integration tests after the update.
Small number of machines?
Disable unattended-upgrades and use crontab to schedule this on the days of the week you want.
Eg, Monday each week at 4 am - every combination of dates and days is possible with crontab. 2nd Tuesdays in a month? No problem.
0 4 * * MON apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && reboot(You can also be more subtle by calling a script that does the above, and also does things like check whether a reboot is needed first)
Dozens, hundreds or thousands of machines? Use a scheduling automation system like Uyuni. That way you can put machines into System Groups and set patching schedule like that. And you can also define groups of machines, either ad-hoc or with System Groups, to do emergency patching like that day's openssh critical vuln by sending a remote command like the above to a batch at a time.
All of that is pretty normal SME/Enterprise sysadminning, so there's some good tools. I like Uyuni, but others have their preference.
However - Crowdstrike on Linux operates much like CS on Windows - they will push out updates, and you have little or no control over when or what. They aren't unique in this - pretty much every AV needs to be able to push updates to clients when new malware is detected. But! In the example of Crowdstrike breaking EL 9.4 a few months ago when it took exception to a new kernel and refused to boot, then yes, scheduled group patching would have minimised the damage. It did so for us, but we only have CS installed on a handful of Linux machines.
Maybe you could switch to an image based distro which is easy to roll back and won't boot into a broken image.
Which distro is image based and have the staggered rollout feature I'm after?
What you're asking for is a CI/CD pipeline that deploys a set of OS updates as a set revision. I don't the details on how to do it but that's the concept you're asking for.
What do you mean?
It's called a staging environment. You have servers you apply changes to first before going to production.
I assume you mean this for home though, so take a small number of your machines and have them run unattended upgrades daily, and set whatever you're worried about to only run them every few weeks or something.
No, I'm asking how to have unattended-upgrades do that.
Duder... c'mon: https://wiki.debian.org/UnattendedUpgrades
(oops - replied in the wrong place)
You could go the Ansible route. (No unattended upgrades)
Cron with the -y option on apt commands.
What? I said I'm already using unattended-upgrades.
A cron job that runs when you want it to instead of the unattended updates metapackage.
unattended-upgrades can already do that actually, i e. you can configure the systemd timers. But that's insufficient for my needs. Using a mirror seems like the best option so far.
In an ideal world, there should be 3 separated environments of the same app/service:
devel → staging → production.Devel = playground, stagging = near identical to the production.
So you can test the updates before fixing production.
So you can test the updates before fixing production.
My question is how to do that with APT.
I think there is no a out-of-the-box solution.
You can run security updates manually, but it's too much to do.Try to host apt mirrors in different stages, with
unattended-updatestuned on.
Devel will have the latest.
Staging the latest positively tested on the devel.
Production the latest positively tested on the staging.