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.