Option to automatically reboot Ubuntu for security updates

[Lonkle]

@nebulon So it was completely the other way around. You're updating the host version (what Cloudron runs on) to 20.04 (Focal), but leaving the DOCKERIMAGE FROM base version at 18.04 (Bionic) until at least security patch support stops coming out for it. Did I get that correct this time?

Sorry, new to the Ubuntu world.

[imc67]

@nebulon and @girish somehow this change (or something else) made the reboot of my 3 cloudron servers superfast!

Before it took at least 4-6 minutes and today everything (all services and apps) are up again within 1 minute!!!!

Good job!!

[d19dotca]

@imc67 Same here. Was really fast tonight for security updates.

[DanTheMan]

Mine was really noticable faster too. Running Ubuntu 18.04 OS here.
Reboot and apps up and running in less than a minute. Like 40 to 45 seconds in total.

Keep up the good work Cloudron staff

[jdaviescoates]

Wow. 🤯

It's WAY faster now.

Like, lightning fast.

I just did a reboot to finish a Ubuntu security update and everything was back up and running in less than 60 seconds.

I almost couldn't believe it!

Thanks!

[Lonkle]

Same here, less than a minute now. Still looking forward to live patches. But I reboot a lot to change the way apphealthmonitor.js works (making it more accurate) and I need to reboot after every change so this is just a godsend.

[d19dotca]

Guess that “sync” was the problem then, though weird if it’s been in there for years already without issues. Maybe something just incompatible after certain updates were applied which caused sync to take so long.

[robi]

@DanTheMan
Likely due to improvements in 18.04.4 and above.

@Lonk
To avoid having to reboot the box, you can run your tests in a docker container using the sysbox-runc for full OS (machine image) capability in a docker container.

Then just reboot the sysbox container.
See requirements: https://github.com/nestybox/sysbox-ee/blob/master/docs/distro-compat.md

[Lonkle]

@robi Interesting feature. Could save development time. Thanks!

[warg]

Is there any news on this? What shall we do if the only sysadmin is on vacation/sick for 4 weeks? A automatic reboot in case it's needed for security updates would be good.

[nebulon]

I guess it may make sense to add an optional automatic reboot in such cases, although this may cause downtime in unexpected timeslots if apps are used in multiple timezones, especially if reboot takes longer.

[warg]

Yep. For those cases it shouldn't be too bad: The fixed timeslots/dates can be communicated/planned accordingly and if it's on demand and no admin is available, the users can get told that they should be worried only if downtime is >1h or something like that. That's at least better than no patched server and in worst case coming home and finding a disaster .

[robi]

This can be automated today with ctfreak which can reboot a system if certain conditions are met. Would be good to document such options.

[potemkin_ai]

@nebulon just for information - livepatch doesn't mean you don't have to reboot - it just lets you postpone that moment as convenient.

For sync - a good practice on old good *nix is to issue sync twice before reboot - to make sure the buffers dumped for sure.

On the reboot automation using third-party apps - it's doable; everything is, but why, if you can just add it inside of the system?