7 Sep 2015 Stevey   » (Master)

The Jessie 8.2 point-release broke for me

I have about 18 personal hosts, all running the Jessie release of Debian GNU/Linux. To keep up with security updates I use unattended-upgrades.

The intention is that every day, via cron, the system will look for updates and apply them. Although I mostly expect it to handle security updates I also have it configured such that point-releases will be applied by magic too.

Unfortunately this weekend, with the 8.2 release, things broke in a significant way - The cron deamon was left in a broken state, such that all cronjobs failed to execute.

I was amazed that nobody had reported a bug, as several people on twitter had the same experience as me, but today I read through a lot of bug-reports and discovered that #783683 is to blame:

  • Old-cron runs.
  • Scheduled unattended-upgrades runs.
  • This causes cron to restart.
  • When cron restarts the jobs it was running are killed.
  • The system is in a broken state.

The solution:

# dpkg --configure -a
# apt-get upgrade

I guess the good news is I spotted it promptly, with the benefit of hindsight the bug report does warn of this as being a concern, but I guess there wasn't a great solution.

Anyway I hope others see this, or otherwise spot the problem themselves.

 

In unrelated news the seaweedfs file-store I previously introduced is looking more and more attractive to me.

I reported a documentation-related bug which was promptly handled, even though it turned out I was wrong, and I contributed CIDR support to whitelisting hosts which was merged in well.

I've got a two-node "cluster" setup at the moment, and will be expanding that shortly.

I've been doing a lot of little toy-projects in Go recently. This weekend I was mostly playing with the nats.io message-bus, and tying it together with sinatra.

Syndicated 2015-09-07 09:37:05 from Steve Kemp's Blog

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