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Comment by refp | Hacker News Reader

I remember when you were actually able to keep up with CVEs and you could (at least somewhat) prioritize patches while disregarding those which felt irrelevant.

But now.. are we simply supposed to use our f̶a̶v̶o̶r̶i̶t̶e̶ package manager and batch update our systems in a loop?

    while true; do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade -y; sleep 1d; done

wait. erhm... and probably an automatic reboot/kernel reload every 48h; THAT WILL DO IT! </sarcasm>

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This is a confusing comment because Debian/Ubuntu/etc (you referenced apt) have separate security repositories that exist for this purpose. They have only security fixes and don't try to unnecessarily fix "other" stuff. I have not heard of the security repos pushing out a breaking update before.

`unattended-upgrade` uses only a subset of repos (ie security) and does this for you. If you actually wanted to schedule reboots, it can do that too.

The comment in question is a joke; it was never intended to be read as actual advice.

Especially in environments where manglement mandate something like Qualys, leading to demands that systems must be patched to address the critical vulnerabilities that it's reported despite said vulnerabilities being unexploitable.

One that I trot out periodically as an example of this is a CVE that would only be exploitable if running on an IBM s390 with EBCDIC codepages. Our security team nevertheless wanted it patched, because Qualys said it was a vulnerability.

Had that in /old job/ years ago, every security report would list off a load of packages that needed updating. Problem was, not only were they not actual vulnerabilities but they were all for some legacy software that was in the process of being removed.

Was always fun to purge a load of systems from old shit, and watch the counter drop.

Wire the script to a pressure sensor in your seat, save-all/update/reboot every time you get out of your chair.

Bonus points for relaunching programs open during initial execution of script.

perhaps we better add a job to automatically order new IoT devices from amazon too; once a month is probably good enough not to suffer. I think we just invented Upgrades-As-A-Service.. only $50/month for freshly not-yet-known-to-be-b0rked firmware!

are you gonna spot the LLM bill or should I?

... or that the kernel can't be hot reloaded is itself a vulnerability?

There are pro/enterprise features that can upgrade the linux kernel without downtime, like livepatch or kpatch. (The non-proprietary klp-build is still missing tooling for most distros I think.)

I still don't trust that sort of thing. And I don't think I ever will.

Debian based systems can be queried if they need a reboot because of dpkg. But this was the same then 20 years ago....

Is anyone at Debian paid to keep up with this spigot of CVEs?

"Shit why is everything dead"

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