Automatic update & upgrade

[A Former User]

Other question: Does Cloudron reboot the server automatically, if updates are finished? I get the message "This server requires a reboot to finalize Ubuntu security updates.". What is if i ignore the message?

[nebulon]

Reboots are not automatic

[will]

@timo If you ignore the message, the relevant security updates are not installed and you are still vulnerable. Its not super critical to reboot ASAP, I usually let mine go a few days, but any more than that and it becomes risky. Remember, Cloudron is the home for all your personal and perhaps business data. Caution is advised.

[yusf]

Is it a good idea to schedule occasional reboots via cron on the Cloudron system?

[nebulon]

Maybe it could make sense to add an option to schedule reboots during the night if required? Adding a cron job without checking if it is actually required might be a bit over to the top.

[A Former User]

@nebulon Yes, a very good Idea.

[msbt]

also some of my servers are encrypted and require me to enter a password when booting, this would take the whole thing offline until I enter it, so this needs to be optional

[nebulon]

Very good point about the reboot with encryption!

[A Former User]

@nebulon Do you add this feature at the next cloudron version?

[yusf]

@msbt Off topic, but what encryption method do you use?

[msbt]

@yusf it's mostly VMs on dedicated Proxmox hosts with standard full disk encryption (luks I believe), but I just realized they're all still on 16.04, gonna have to do some updating

[yusf]

@msbt I have to look that up.

That reminds me of an on-topic question. Does Cloudron also handles dist upgrades? If not, how should I perform those myself without breaking anything?

[msbt]

it does not, but there's this blogpost: https://cloudron.io/blog/2018-11-26-upgrading-to-bionic.html

[yusf]

Thanks, I haven’t seen it.

It makes me wonder what happens when a Cloudron’s host system reaches its end-of-life. Email notification perhaps?

[girish]

Only security updates are applied automatically. Dist upgrade have to be done by hand. If dist upgrade fails, best bet is to restore into a new instance from a backup.

[yusf]

@girish Probably even faster to simply migrate to a new VPS direcly, yeah?

[ruihildt]

@yusf From my experience, yes. And you're sure to start from a clean slate for another few years.

[girish]

Yeah, my experience with ubuntu upgades especially dist upgade is spotty at best. I just upgraded my laptop to Ubuntu 19 yesterday and it was total fail. I just re-installed and started afresh. What I do is to backup my $HOME and put it back in a new installation.

[yusf]

@girish All these years and it’s still a pain >_<

Edit: I’m referring to Linux distros ofc, not Cloudron.