[Bug 244250] Re: Spurious reboot notifications caused by libssl upgrades.

[Marc Deslauriers]

Right now, the best way we have of determining if we're a server or a
desktop is to check if X is running. It's not ideal, and suggestions are
welcome.

We need a way for sysadmins to get notifications that some of the major
automatic updates they are installing, such as openssl and the kernel,
require services and/or the system to get restarted after a security
update. The mechanism we have now is the reboot notification tool.

I agree that a lot of libraries can have security issues also, and in
fact, most of the server packages will gracefully restart when they get
security updates. For openssl, and a few other select libraries, things
are different. Security issues in openssl usually are of importance for
network servers, and automatically restarting all the running daemons
isn't an option, especially since the server could be running software
that wasn't installed from packages in the archive. In this case, the
reboot notification indicates to the sysadmin that manual intervention
is needed. If the sysadmin decides that nothing on his server is
affected, he can simply remove the reboot notification file. Yes, this
solution is far from perfect, but the alternative is to disable
notifications completely, which is not a viable option.

I am completely open to suggestions on improving this process and having
a discussion with you, outside of this bug, to have your ideas on how it
could be done in a way which would satisfy the majority of our users.

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/244250

Title:
  Spurious reboot notifications caused by libssl upgrades.

Status in “openssl” package in Ubuntu:
  Fix Released

Bug description:
  The postinst script for libssl0.9.8 currently has a bug where it sends
  a reboot notifcation whenever libssl is configured.  So reconfiguring
  libssl0.9.8 or even just installing libssl0.9.8 will result in a
  reboot notification.  Sending of the reboot notification should
  definitely be moved inside the upgrading guard.  The correct fix is
  likely to move it inside a version comparison guard for particular
  important updates like Colin suggests below -- this is what every
  other standard package using notify-reboot-required does.

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