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.

  • @[email protected]OP
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    fedilink
    14 months ago

    I found the page about “phased upgrades” (somehow missed it searching for “staggered”, “incremental”, “delayed”, etc). Thanks for the pointer!

    Unfortunately it doesn’t seem configurable on my end, and it rolls out in about 54 hours so it can take out most of my machines before I have time to react (my first machine might update ~20h into the phased rollout, the rest will break within 24h). Bummer!

    • @just_another_person
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      -24 months ago

      That doesn’t even have anything to do with this. Phased upgrades are about CHANNELS. As in a select number of systems get the upgrades before anyone else. This is similar to a staging environment in that it minimizes risk. You clearly do not understand what you are asking for here, and are unable to articulate it well enough for us to understand either. I suggest you ask in a different way with more information.

    • @just_another_person
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      -44 months ago

      You should be more courteous to the guy who has been responding to you, because he’s giving you exactly what you’re asking for, you just don’t know how to ask for it properly. Just a piece of advice 🤌

      That being said, since you don’t know what you’re afraid of exactly, I can tell you in my long history of running thousands of Linux machines, containers and VMs at scale, I’ve never ever once since an unattended upgrade do anything that couldn’t immediately be rolled back or fixed. The worst I’ve seen is services impacted that do not start. So why don’t you just chill out a tiny a bit about your Jellyfin server or whatever you’re being rude about.

      • @[email protected]OP
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        24 months ago

        I find it hard to stay courteous in the presence of people like you, who reply without reading my post, call me “duder” and say I “don’t understand what I am asking for”.

        Thankfully, I did get a great answer from someone else.