enterprise-ubuntu team mailing list archive

[Bolesław Tokarski <boleslaw.tokarski@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hello,

Personally, I am using unattended-upgrades. This one rarely produces any
pop-up. Can't say I solved the problem, though.

At one point I had a problem with cloned USB sticks containing the OS.
These were the LiveCD-kind, but grub was configured to install in the
MBR using the /dev/disk/by-id/ -style ID. Of course it turned out that
every USB stick has a different ID, but not until there was a grub
update did we notice that there is a problem. As the grub package did
not know where to put the updated version, it prompted with a question,
where the default answer was to put on every MBR. That of course
included the physical hard drive, where people were running Windows. So
that was a question that had a high chance of breaking the machine.

I would suggest you to check the force-confold option to dpkg. You can
put it to dpkg.conf, so thus system-wide. This should dismiss all or
most of the configuration merge requests. Then, some packages have a
debconf-style question and configure the package depending on the
answers from those questions. Hopefully most can be preseeded to hold
the answer that debconf should not manage the configuration of the
package (I guess a good example is samba). For now I still can't work
around pam-auth-update, but I focused on different things...

Cheers,
Ballock

On 25/06/13 20:05, David Burke wrote:
> Hey folks,
>
> I wonder how people handle this. A good number of updates show prompts
> to the user asking questions beyond their understanding. For example
> grub or lightdm. In an enterprise these configurations might be
> managed. Because these conf files are different, I get many more of
> these questions than a stock Ubuntu install where it's much less of a
> problem.
>
> My users are non technical and tend to click anything on prompts
> (including non default options). This can do damage from breaking
> authentication to just users getting worried and contacting IT (which
> adds to costs)
>
> Fully automated updates done like this
> <http://askubuntu.com/questions/146921/how-do-i-apt-get-y-dist-upgrade-without-a-grub-config-prompt>
> won't ask questions - but cause instability if the user powers down
> during an update. If a user is aware of the update they (hopefully)
> won't turn the computer off suddenly.
>
> Puppet mitigates some pain by ensuring configurations are changed back
> but users still get prompts that might worry them.
>
> Ideally I'd like update manager to never ask questions under any
> circumstance and always use defaults.
>
> Best,
> David Burke
>
>