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.
podman quadlets with auto updates running on opensuse microos
im not yet self hosting a ton of services tho
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.
Those apt commands are in a less-good order. It’s usually better to update apt, then upgrade the system.
I upgrade as soon as reasonably possible after the notification appears, if the system isn’t on auto-upgrade.
Every night at ~ 12-1am
unattended updates / transactional-update are awesome.
Stuff has been running for years, and it’s still up to date.
This guy scares me
This is the way! At least install security upgrades nightly using
unattended-upgradesand reboot from time to time to get the latest Kernel version.Once per week for me. Works really great on openSUSE MicroOS. Had to roll back maybe a couple of times the last few years.
That said, I run basically everything in containers so the OS installed things are lean.
Weekly. Cronjob.
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.
Unattended-upgrade does security-only patching once every 4 hours (in rough sync with my local mirror)
Full upgrades are done weekly, accompanied by a reboot
I find that the split between security patching and feature/bug patching maintains a healthy balance knowing when something is likely to break but never being behind on the latest cve.
For me, unattended-upgrade does it’s thing. Updating other packages happens whenever I think about it. Very few things are not containerized and there’s very little added beyond the base Debian install, so when I do update its maybe a dozen packages.
I would previously reboot during thunderstorms if we lost power, but now that I’ve got a UPS I probably ought to come up with a different plan.
Anything exposed to the internet gets a daily / weekly update, depending on how exposed it is, how stable the updates are and how critical a breach would be. For example nginx would be a daily update.
Anything behind a vpn gets a more random update schedule mostly based on when I feel like it (probably around once a month or every other month)
When I remember. About once a month.
Same here. No auto updates, no touching of a stable system without my manual intervention. 😅
Last thing I need in my life is a broken system at home when I don’t have time for it!
Well, one of the reasons I’m using debian on my server is so I can kinda forget about it…
I’ll update maybe once a month, or every couple months. I don’t always restart though, so my kernel is probably a bit behind :'D
I use Debian stable and subscribe to the debian-security-announce mailing list, so I update each time I get an email from it.
This is the way. (At least for a server)
That’s… Not how it works… Debian is “stable” not “secure”. You use Debian so that is easier to run updates frequently since they’ll be unlikely to break things.
If I wanted to run updates frequently I would run arch lmao. Even if I did apt update every day, debian stable doesn’t get that many updates.
I could just run auto-update but meh.
If I wanted to run updates frequently I would run arch lmao. Even if I did apt update every day, debian stable doesn’t get that many updates.
You’re not updating for features you’re updating for bug and security fixes. That’s why Debian stable doesn’t have many updates. But the ones they do are typically important.
Yeah, I know. Until I get ransomware’d and my nudes leaked, I won’t care 💅🏻✨
Clearly you don’t know.
I guess people smoke because they don’t know smoking causes cancer ;3
Are you talking about desktop use?
No, my home server. My desktop and laptop both have arch, because I do interact with them more often.
lol. Same issue for me. I run it for months, and surprisingly (for me) nothing breaks at all.
But fucking ssh shows warnings regarding some “post quantum crypto” stuff; recommending software update, that was not there before lol.
Usely every 3/4 months roughly. I try to remeber to update. The base. Server. And docker based things! /webserices. I update. Sparingly. Every few new versions. As I am the only user of my server. I don’t have a high need to update. So I update only if a new future. Is added or a mayor bug /security patch.
Once a week. I have a bash script that does an apt update upgrade and pulls new docker images.
First Friday of the month. Easy to remember.





