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
Every day or at least once a week. Should automate it.
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.
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.
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.
my nixos containers and the podman containers inside them update nightly around 03:00
Monthly unless I learn about a vulnerability that would require it sooner.
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, but if they are not, with notifications that I should go reboot them.
If it’s not anything serious, whenever I remember to.
Yum-cron. Daily. Rolling bounce on a schedule.
It has been rock-solid for 20 years, but lennart’s cancer and the growing amount of shite they’re shoveling into EL has caused a few issues here and there with 7, 9 and 10. (Skipped 8 because f that)
But, today, it works. So that’s year 23 and 8 months.
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).
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.
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.




