I just got around to playing with this. These changes help is most situations.
unattended-upgrades was able to upgrade grub without any prompt! I also tried hard shutting down in the middle of an upgrade - it seemed to recover fine. So I'm going to start using it. pam-auth-update - I've seen it silently nuke pam.d confs :( I solved it by ensuring pam-auth-update works when run with defaults. ie not just hacking pam.d files. Thanks Ballock for the advice. On Wed, Jun 26, 2013 at 4:11 AM, Bolesław Tokarski < boleslaw.tokar...@tieto.com> wrote: > Hello, > > Personally, I am using unattended-upgrades. This one rarely produces any > pop-up. Can't say I solved the problem, though. > > At one point I had a problem with cloned USB sticks containing the OS. > These were the LiveCD-kind, but grub was configured to install in the MBR > using the /dev/disk/by-id/ -style ID. Of course it turned out that every > USB stick has a different ID, but not until there was a grub update did we > notice that there is a problem. As the grub package did not know where to > put the updated version, it prompted with a question, where the default > answer was to put on every MBR. That of course included the physical hard > drive, where people were running Windows. So that was a question that had a > high chance of breaking the machine. > > I would suggest you to check the force-confold option to dpkg. You can put > it to dpkg.conf, so thus system-wide. This should dismiss all or most of > the configuration merge requests. Then, some packages have a debconf-style > question and configure the package depending on the answers from those > questions. Hopefully most can be preseeded to hold the answer that debconf > should not manage the configuration of the package (I guess a good example > is samba). For now I still can't work around pam-auth-update, but I focused > on different things... > > Cheers, > Ballock > > > On 25/06/13 20:05, David Burke wrote: > > Hey folks, > > I wonder how people handle this. A good number of updates show prompts > to the user asking questions beyond their understanding. For example grub > or lightdm. In an enterprise these configurations might be managed. Because > these conf files are different, I get many more of these questions than a > stock Ubuntu install where it's much less of a problem. > > My users are non technical and tend to click anything on prompts > (including non default options). This can do damage from breaking > authentication to just users getting worried and contacting IT (which adds > to costs) > > Fully automated updates done like > this<http://askubuntu.com/questions/146921/how-do-i-apt-get-y-dist-upgrade-without-a-grub-config-prompt>won't > ask questions - but cause instability if the user powers down during > an update. If a user is aware of the update they (hopefully) won't turn the > computer off suddenly. > > Puppet mitigates some pain by ensuring configurations are changed back > but users still get prompts that might worry them. > > Ideally I'd like update manager to never ask questions under any > circumstance and always use defaults. > > Best, > David Burke > > > > > -- > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~enterprise-ubuntu > Post to : enterprise-ubuntu@lists.launchpad.net > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~enterprise-ubuntu > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp > >
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