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I was under the impression that the sync command makes device removal safer somehow. Even though the device was unmounted, there may be cached data that wasn’t written yet. Could be wrong about that, but it seems harmless to include.

Edit: looked it up, and umount calls sync, so there’s no need to include it. And if you do include it, sync before umount, like you said.

It looks like it’s for their immediate family. I had issues with this when I was supporting people I didn’t live with, but if they’re using the same PC, it shouldn’t be an issue until something breaks.

I use NixOS, Gentoo, and Debian:

• NixOS because I like declarative configuration files.
• Gentoo because I enjoy compiling from source.
• Debian because the other two are more difficult to use.

Perfection

Media server: Jellyfin, qBittorrent, Radarr/Sonarr/Lidarr/Prowlarr, and OpenVPN/Traefik/WireGuard

Misc: PiHole, Vaultwarden, HashiCorp Vault, and FreeIPA

VMware ESXi for the VMs, but I’ll be switching to Proxmox soon.

All running in Docker or Podman containers on their own VMs. I’m trying to automate the deployment and configuration of each of these services via pipelines in GitLab CI using Ansible and Terraform right now. I also have a couple of Kubernetes clusters for testing and dev stuff on this server.

Accessed via SSH or an NGINX reverse proxy. I’m using certificates where possible, but a lot of the traffic between VMs is still unencrypted. I’ll eventually force everything local to use Traefik, but for now, only a few services are using it.

There are a lot of projects on awesome-selfhosted and selfhosted that I’ve been meaning to get around to installing. Home Assistant and AdGuard Home are two of them.

OpenStack has a really good Ansible hardening project for securing servers that I try to always use. I also have a Red Hat developer license, so I try to use their OS when possible because of their FIPS and other security profiles. Some services just don’t work with any of the newer RHEL versions though, and I usually fall back to CentOS Stream or Ubuntu whenever that happens.

This is a great idea. I didn’t see a Linux subway yet, but the process for requesting new lines seems pretty simple.

The “bot” suggested I use RandomSleep. It’s not effortless.

I got the idea to use systemd timers from another answer in this thread and thought I’d help you out with an Ansible playbook.

In any case, I learned at least two things while reading the other replies, so it wasn’t a total waste. (and you got your answer)

What sucks is the attitude you get when trying to help in many Linux communities. It’s a tool, and a very useful one too.

If you knew what you were doing, you could understand the loop just by looking at it, without having to run it, ngl.

I didn’t run it, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an invalid option in it somewhere. Ansible Lightspeed would be a better tool than what I used, but it’s sufficient to get the point across.

I use AI for grammar correction or to help put a thought into words sometimes. Needs some more work to sound natural though.

That’s a great idea! Learned something new, thanks.

To effectively manage and stagger automated upgrades across multiple groups of Ubuntu servers, scheduling upgrades on specific days for different server groups offers a structured and reliable method. This approach ensures that upgrades are rolled out in a controlled manner, reducing the risk of potential disruptions.

Here’s an example Ansible playbook that illustrates how to set this up. It installs unattended-upgrades and configures systemd timers to manage upgrades on specific weekdays for three distinct groups of servers.

  ---
  - hosts: all
    become: yes
    vars:
      unattended_upgrade_groups:
        - name: staging_batch1
          schedule: "Mon *-*-* 02:00:00"  # Updates on Monday
        - name: staging_batch2
          schedule: "Wed *-*-* 02:00:00"  # Updates on Wednesday
        - name: staging_batch3
          schedule: "Fri *-*-* 02:00:00"  # Updates on Friday

    tasks:
      - name: Install unattended-upgrades
        apt:
          name: unattended-upgrades
          state: present

      - name: Disable automatic updates to control manually
        copy:
          dest: /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades
          content: |
            APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
            APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "0";
            APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "7";
            APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";
          mode: '0644'

      - name: Setup systemd service and timer for each group
        loop: "{{ unattended_upgrade_groups }}"
        block:
          - name: Create systemd service for unattended-upgrades for {{ item.name }}
            copy:
              dest: "/etc/systemd/system/unattended-upgrades-{{ item.name }}.service"
              content: |
                [Unit]
                Description=Run unattended upgrades for {{ item.name }}

                [Service]
                Type=oneshot
                ExecStart=/usr/bin/unattended-upgrade
              mode: '0644'

          - name: Create systemd timer for {{ item.name }}
            copy:
              dest: "/etc/systemd/system/unattended-upgrades-{{ item.name }}.timer"
              content: |
                [Unit]
                Description=Timer for unattended upgrades on {{ item.schedule }} for {{ item.name }}

                [Timer]
                OnCalendar={{ item.schedule }}
                Persistent=true

                [Install]
                WantedBy=timers.target
              mode: '0644'

          - name: Enable the timer for {{ item.name }}
            systemd:
              name: "unattended-upgrades-{{ item.name }}.timer"
              enabled: yes

          - name: Start the timer for {{ item.name }}
            systemd:
              name: "unattended-upgrades-{{ item.name }}.timer"
              state: started

Same here. Our servers are so out of date that we might not have a version of xz with any commits from Jia Tan at all.

I rely on notifications from glsa-check or my distro’s package manager. I was notified about a problem with xz-utils on Thursday evening, but didn’t see anyone post about it until Friday morning.

glsa-check is a command-line tool included with the gentoolkit package in Gentoo Linux. Its primary function is to scan your system for installed packages that are vulnerable according to Gentoo Linux Security Advisories (GLSAs). GLSAs are official notifications from the Gentoo security team about security vulnerabilities that affect packages in the Gentoo repository.

Yeah, it’s probably fine. I also don’t use systemd. I was just pointing out that another rolling release distribution had the affected version.

Red Hat Linux 6.0, back in 1999. It was one of the first distributions to include GNOME as the default desktop environment.

It was also on Gentoo. I had this version installed for a day or two.