Or asked the other way around: How long do you keep your servers running without installing any software updates?
update means something like
sudo dnf update
or something …
apt-get upgrade
apt-get update
Whenever I ssh into it.
Monthly unless I learn about a vulnerability that would require it sooner.
Only mostly when I want to. Which tends to be on Mondays and Saturdays.
I’m running Sid on servers, so automatic updates are actually a risk. Used to be Debian Stable, but maaan the docker and podman improvements… make me drool.
Every day or at least once a week. Should automate it.
Should; Could; How high of a priority is this update automation for you? This is also how I run my server. Configuration possibilities are infinite.
Automatic daily updates for system packages. Automatic daily container updates with watchtower. I normally have things pinned to a reasonable major or minor release, so I do manual upgrades for new OS release branches and usually pin to a major version for Docker containers but depends on the container.
maybe like once in 3 months. i usually update when i need to setup something new on the server that needs to install new packages.
On Windows, almost never since it was a disruptive shitshow. Now that I’ve got everything running Linux it’s weekly. Often sooner if I happen to be remoting in and manually update.
Weekly. Cronjob.
When something doesn’t work. I.e. when an app update causes incompatibility with a service. I think I have one server that’s a few years without an update (distro version may actually be EOL for all I know).
Why probably so may unpatched issues.
Ain’t broke and I can’t be bothered to update. Not accessible publicly either. It also runs some software with very specific and brittle dependencies and I don’t care to risk breaking it. If distro is EOL (probably is) then it’d be a pretty time consuming getting everything set up again.
my nixos containers and the podman containers inside them update nightly around 03:00
Apt update and upgrade happen automatically.
If I have something serious, I will set up automatic upgrades. If short downtimes are ok, also with automatic reboots when the kernel updates.
If it’s not anything serious, whenever I remember to.
I run Ubuntu Server 24.04 LTS with k3s. I update my container versions every few months, though not everything I’m running all at once. I update the actual system packages via apt maybe once a year and end up nuking and re-installing everything every couple years on average. I deliberately block all inbound WAN traffic in my firewall and use k8s network policies to aggressively limit egress WAN connections because I’m aware that I’m bad about keeping things up to date.
Daily on my Gentoo server, through a Cronjob every morning. It’s a custom script though, so there’s more than just doing an emerge update. It’ll send me ntfy notifications for the update results, if there are new news items, and if there are any time config merge updates to make. A few other things as well but that’s the main stuff.
Other servers, typically weekly or only manually when I ssh into them (for the ones I don’t really feel the need to update frequently).
podman quadlets with auto updates running on opensuse microos
im not yet self hosting a ton of services tho
