No automatic package update notifications since Intrepid upgrade

Bug #299360 reported by Thilo-Alexander Ginkel
28
This bug affects 3 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
apt (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

Since upgrading my Kubuntu installation from 8.04 to 8.10 I no longer receive any automatic notification for pending package updates (such as security updates). Manually running 'apt-get update', however, immediately brings up the notification icon in the systray, so the generic notification mechanism seems to work, but apparently the automatic polling for new updates does not.

In Adept's "Software Sources" section automatic update checking is configured to run once a day and only notify about pending updates.

Any idea?

Please let me know if you need any additional details.

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Thomas Pfeiffer (o-monroe) wrote :

Same here. And even Adept-Manager only allows updates after manually fetching package lists. In 8.04 KDE4 remix it still worked fine.

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Thilo-Alexander Ginkel (thilo.ginkel) wrote :

Apparently my system did not have apt-watch-backend installed. I have corrected this just now and will wait for the next security update to see whether this fixes the issue.

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Thilo-Alexander Ginkel (thilo.ginkel) wrote :

Ok, as security updates are available for over a day now and I received no automatic package update notification I continued my investigation for the root cause of this issue. As it turned out, /etc/cron.daily/apt is not marked as executable on my system.

@Thomas: Can you please check if that also applies to your system?

I Cc'd the Ubuntu Security Team as I consider a missing notification about security-relevant updates a security issue - while not being exploitable itself it will cause other (possibly exploitable) security issues to remain unpatched.

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Jannis Menn (jannis-menn) wrote :

I have the same problem. On my system, /etc/cron.daily/apt is also not executable. I've changed this, hopefully it will work now. Good Idea to CC this to the security team.

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Jannis Menn (jannis-menn) wrote :

Now it works!

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Thomas Pfeiffer (o-monroe) wrote : [Bug 299360] Re: No automatic package update notifications since Intrepid upgrade

I've also tried with Wireless and that works as well. Seems to have been
fixed by some update.

On Fri, 2008-11-28 at 13:43 +0000, Jannis Menn wrote:
> Now it works!
>

Revision history for this message
grauscho (grauscho) wrote :

Indeed, making /etc/cron.daily/apt executable resolves the issue.

If it is widespread, this bug should get very, very high importance.

Are there Intrepid users with executable /etc/cron.daily/apt after upgrading from Hardy?

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Mike Hurst (mhurst1) wrote :

Yes I updated from Hardy and it is Excutable however I also don't get updates automatically I have to apt-get update manually for it to work.

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Mike Hurst (mhurst1) wrote :

Right after I typed my last reply i restarted X and then it worked. I did install some update before that so maybe one of them fixed this issue.

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Dirk (dirk-nolte) wrote :

The same here. Scince I have upgrade to Jaunty /etc/cron.daily/apt is not marked as executable.

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Dan Kegel (dank) wrote :
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Torsten Spindler (tspindler) wrote :

It is unclear to me if this problem has been resolved through an update or not?

Changed in apt (Ubuntu):
status: New → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Victor Vargas (kamus) wrote :

We are closing this bug report because it lacks the information we need to investigate the problem, as described in the previous comments. Please reopen it if you can give us the missing information, and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future. To reopen the bug report you can click on the current status, under the Status column, and change the Status back to "New". Thanks again!

Changed in apt (Ubuntu):
status: Incomplete → Invalid
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