[Bug 1629311] [NEW] Seemingly randon execution time of unattended-upgrades

[Daniel Fritsch]

Public bug reported:

On Ubuntu 16.04 the execution time of unattended-upgrades is apparently
defined by systemd timers and not cron anymore.

This seems to be a major change from other LTS distros which I see two
issues with:

1) All the documentation online never mentions the change to systemd,
therefore making the troubleshooting more complicated cause one would
look in the wrong places.

2) The execution time is set to 6am and 6pm with a random delay of 12h.
This is different than the settings for init.d systems where the timing
is handled by cron (6am plus a random delay of 30 minutes).

It would probably make sense to change the systemd timer to reflect the
same settings as the cron timer, and to mention in the documentation
that the execution of unattended-upgrades is handled differently based
on what system it is running on.

** Affects: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu)
     Importance: Undecided
         Status: New

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1629311

Title:
  Seemingly randon execution time of unattended-upgrades

Status in unattended-upgrades package in Ubuntu:
  New

Bug description:
  On Ubuntu 16.04 the execution time of unattended-upgrades is
  apparently defined by systemd timers and not cron anymore.

  This seems to be a major change from other LTS distros which I see two
  issues with:

  1) All the documentation online never mentions the change to systemd,
  therefore making the troubleshooting more complicated cause one would
  look in the wrong places.

  2) The execution time is set to 6am and 6pm with a random delay of
  12h. This is different than the settings for init.d systems where the
  timing is handled by cron (6am plus a random delay of 30 minutes).

  It would probably make sense to change the systemd timer to reflect
  the same settings as the cron timer, and to mention in the
  documentation that the execution of unattended-upgrades is handled
  differently based on what system it is running on.

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