Scheduled patch deployment on Ubuntu

Hi,

We have a problem related to scheduled patch deployment, which works just fine on other types of operating systems - but we have problems when it comes to our servers running on Ubuntu.

We have a monthly maintenance window, normally two hours but sometimes as little as one hour. In this time frame we need to deploy all new patches and also reboot the server if necessary.

On Ubuntu we have since long had an issue that the evaluation takes a very long time (approx 15 minutes per fixlet). We have reported this to IBM support and they have explained that this is normal. For this reason we normally schedule actions ahead where we specify the patches to apply with the “Start client downloads before constraints are satisfied” option, together with the time window.

This approach works just fine with SuSE, when the patch windows start at 1600CET, the patches are installed at once, since the fixlets have already been downloaded. On our Ubuntu systems this is not working as expected. It could time everything from minutes to hours before the patches are actually installed.

Can anyone think of a logical reason why this is the case? Our problem is that we need to know that the patches are installed during this specific timeslot and this is currently not working for us.

Once again, we only see this problem on our Ubuntu systems.

Thanks,
Stefan

As there would be a lot of information needed to determine what is going on I’d suggest you open a PMR so that support can get the data. There may be too much data going through your client to get through quickly etc