Conditional reboot

[rippiedoos]

From my point of view, a conditional reboot with a configurable package list should be nice. At this point, if AUTOREBOOT=yes, the system reboots if ANY package is updated.

Last night, the system was rebooted because dehydrated RPM was updated.

It would be nice if the system reboots only if a package in some list is updated. For instance, only reboot if glibc*, libstd* or kernel* is updated. The rest is restarted automatically during package update.

Maybe an introduction of a third value for AUTOREBOOT=(yes|no|conditional) and a parameter
AUTOREBOOT_ON_PACKAGES="kernel glibc libstd" which would be a matching list would be nice.

[reaperzn]

Hi @rippiedoos

Thanks for raising this. There are a lot of considerations that need to be taken into account when assessing if a server needs to be rebooted after updates. There is not a hard and fast generic way of making this assessment. There is a script in yum-utils which attempts to do this however even with this script, there may be some conditions which are missed based on the setup of the server.

With that in mind, this is not something we would likely build directly into auter however this may be something easily achievable using a post-apply script.

I would recommend something along the lines of this for a RHEL server:

/etc/auter/post-apply.d/01-conditional-reboot.sh

#!/bin/bash

[[ -f /usr/bin/needs-restarting ]] && RUNNING_UPDATED_SERVICES="$(/usr/bin/needs-restarting)"
[[ -n ${RUNNING_UPDATED_SERVICES} ]] && echo "auter --reboot" | at now +1 minute

You can define any conditions you want in the script however I would highly recommend using the echo "auter --reboot" | at now +1 minute as the reboot command to ensure that:

1. the current auter process can complete (Assuming AUTOREBOOT=no the only thing left is some logging)
2. If there are any pre/post reboot scripts, they will also be executed.

[reaperzn]

@rippiedoos I have created a contrib script in #152

You are welcome to test and use that. You can add that as a post-apply script. If you do use that then remember to set AUTOREBOOT=no in your auter.conf file.

If possible please do test it out and let me know your thoughts.

[rippiedoos]

Thanks for the contrib script! Works great!