Amahi Forums

A few days ago we got a new kernel.

Normally I reboot systems when I get a new kernel. I only 'caught' that I had a new kernel, because I finally pulled updates for a FC10 notebook and saw the new kernel so checked the yum.log on my amahi server and there it was.

So should there be a recommendation to reboot after certain updates and how should the user be notified?

If we had a method on install to set /root/.forward we could send the user an alert message.

the policy has eveolved to be: only amahi updates and emergency updates are automatic.

we only had to do an emergency update once (a DNS issue from a year ago).

other updates (linux updates) are not done automatically. the OS may notify the user via a desktop applet, and then it's a matter of user choice.

personally, i've had a server for a long time and i would like to to have some sort of managed updates, so taht i do not have to worry much about them.

we did try to manage updates early on, however, we felt it was too risky. stability was and still is a top goal in amahi.

graphics drivers, drivers for things like vmware and in some cases wifi drivers that people install have firmware, binary or otherwise wrappers that need recompiling on kernel updates, so those can be troublesome in some cases.

one possible solution is to allow the user to select the updates. that is a lot of work for us to put there in the platform and it's something that, as long as the user does not directly expose the box on the net, it should not really be that critical. on top of that there are support issues to consider (box-to-box variations in addition of package breakages that happen every so often upstream).

hence i don't see a lot of benefit of going in that direction myself, when we want to make things less geeky and more mainstream. that said, if there comes a patch that makes that easy to manage we will apply it of course!

hopefully that makes sense.

Ummm,

I am see yum updates in the logwatch email and updates in /var/log/yum.log and I don't recall running yum update myself.

I do believe (and I will ask on the Fedora list) that this can be automated.

I found a thread in the Fedora community list on:

How do you know when a reboot is required after yum update?

One particular reply looks interesting:

> Donald Russell wrote:
> > There have been times though when "things seemed odd" after a
> > particularly large number of updates were applied... rather than spend
> > untold amounts of time trying to solve them, I did a quick reboot...
> > perhaps that was overkill, but it definitely caused all processes to
> > restart.

One quick way to see which processes are using older (deleted) files
is a script I found on fedora-devel-list called "wasted-ram-updates.py":

http://markmail.org/message/dodinyrhwgey35mh

After updates, I always run this to see which processes need to be
restarted. Note that a few entries in this list are "normal" e.g. a
program opens a file for temporary storage, and then deletes it (but
keeps the handle), but most will indicate a process that needs to be
restarted to reload files from a new package.

Depending on the process, a service or application restart may be
enough, or if X/Gnome/KDE files have been updated, a restart of the X
server may be required. I think the only times I have ever required a
total reboot are kernel updates.

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Perhaps you can look at this script and see if it can be integrated into amahi?