[Bug 1615482] Re: apt-daily timer runs at random hours of the day

[Marius Gedminas]

Fun story: unattended-upgrades upgraded docker-engine in the middle of a
day, breaking gitlab CI builds until a sysadmin figured out what
happened and rebooted the machine manually.

unattended-upgrades has an option to postpone unattended reboots to some
safer time (like 2AM).  Perhaps a similar option to postpone unattended-
upgrades themselves would help with this?  It's probably fine to run
other apt-daily activities (like running apt update or apt upgrade
--download-only) during the day.

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Title:
  apt-daily timer runs at random hours of the day

Status in apt package in Ubuntu:
  Triaged

Bug description:
  apt, from 1.2.10 onwards (ie any version in Xenial, onwards) uses a
  systemd timer instead of a cron.daily job. This is a good thing,
  decoupling apt daily runs from the rest of cron, and ensuring other
  cron.daily jobs are not blocked by up to half an hour by the default
  settings of unattended-upgrades.

  However the policy chosen is to have the apt daily script run at a
  random hour of the day in a wrong headed attempt to reduce server
  load. This has the side effect of running unattended-upgrades at
  random hours of the day — such as business hours — rather than being
  confined to between 6:25am and 6:55am, using the defaults.

  A better policy would be to have the script activate at 6:00am plus an
  interval of 20 minutes at one second intervals reducing the impact of
  timezone population spikes, while still allowing unattended-upgrades
  to run within a predictable interval, before 7am.

  At the very least, some sort of note in the NEWS file detailing the
  new behaviour would be welcome.

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