Keep Droplets updated Ubuntu 16.04

August 3, 2016 8.7k views
FAQ Ubuntu 16.04 DigitalOcean Apache LAMP Stack
dordar
By:
dordar

Im working on setting up a lot of droplets, on Ubuntu 16.04, However it is very time consuming to go into each of the droplets and run sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get dist-upgrade.

So what I have done is I have added following into my root crontab:
sudo crontab -u root -e

0 3 * * * root /usr/bin/apt-get update && /usr/bin/apt-get dist-upgrade -q -y >> /var/log/apt/myupdates.log

However it is not working, and I was wondering if there is other things I need to think about?

PS: I have followed DO tutorials on how to disable root, so I dont have a root user, is this a problem?

Thanks

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2 Answers
ioanmoldovan199 August 3, 2016

Your idea is good, and removing root would fix it, but I suggest looking into this as it provides more options and integrates better:
https://help.ubuntu.com/16.04/serverguide/automatic-updates.html

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  • dordar August 3, 2016

    Thanks, I did try this yesterday. But it just wouldnt work, therefore I went back to Cron.
    I will try to remove root and see.

    This is what I did, removed // on the updates line.

    // Automatically upgrade packages from these (origin:archive) pairs
    Unattended-Upgrade::Allowed-Origins {
    “${distroid}:${distrocodename}-security”;
    “${distroid}:${distrocodename}-updates”;
    // “${distroid}:${distrocodename}-proposed”;
    // “${distroid}:${distrocodename}-backports”;

    …

    // Automatically reboot WITHOUT CONFIRMATION
    // if the file /var/run/reboot-required is found after the upgrade
    Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot “true”;

    // If automatic reboot is enabled and needed, reboot at the specific
    // time instead of immediately
    // Default: “now”
    Unattended-Upgrade::Automatic-Reboot-Time “02:00”;

    and in the other file I have exactly this:
    APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists “1”;
    APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages “1”;
    APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval “7”;
    APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade “1”;

    Any idea why it doesnt work?

    • ioanmoldovan199 August 3, 2016

      Well it uses /etc/cron.daily/apt, have you given it 24 hours to see if it doesn’t work?
      Also maybe no updates were issued in that time.
      It should work

ioanmoldovan199 August 3, 2016
  1. You do have a root user, the password is disabled(! in /etc/shadow), but you can still use sudo -i, su is blocked.
  2. Remove root from the entry, it should be: 0 3 * * * /usr/bin/apt-get update && /usr/bin/apt-get dist-upgrade -q -y >> /var/log/apt/myupdates.log (I had the same issue a few months ago)
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