Automatic Updates

Published: October 10, 2017

Planet Debian Planet FSFE Tor Sysadmin

This blog post is more than two years old. It is preserved here in the hope that it is useful to someone, but please be aware that links may be broken and that opinions expressed here may not reflect my current views. If this is a technical article, it may no longer reflect current best practice.

We have instructions for setting up new Tor relays on Debian. The only time the word “upgrade” is mentioned here is:

Be sure to set your ContactInfo line so we can contact you if you need to upgrade or something goes wrong.

This isn’t great. We should have some decent instructions for keeping your relay up to date too. I’ve been compiling a set of documentation for enabling automatic updates on various Linux distributions, here’s a taste of what I have so far:

Debian

Make sure that unattended-upgrades is installed and then enable the installation of updates (as root):

apt install unattended-upgrades
dpkg-reconfigure -plow unattended-upgrades

Fedora 22 or later

Beginning with Fedora 22, you can enable automatic updates via:

dnf install dnf-automatic

In /etc/dnf/automatic.conf set:

apply_updates = yes

Now enable and start automatic updates via:

systemctl enable dnf-automatic.timer
systemctl start dnf-automatic.timer

(Thanks to Enrico Zini I know all about these timer units in systemd now.)

RHEL or CentOS

For CentOS, RHEL, and older versions of Fedora, the yum-cron package is the preferred approach:

yum install yum-cron

In /etc/yum/yum-cron.conf set:

apply_updates = yes

Enable and start automatic updates via:

systemctl start yum-cron.service

I’d like to collect together instructions also for other distributions (and *BSD and Mac OS). Atlas knows which platform a relay is running on, so there could be a link in the future to some platform specific instructions on how to keep your relay up to date.