this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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Tl;dr: Automatic updates on my home server caused 8 hours of downtime of all of renn.es' docker services including email and public websites

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[โ€“] tarneo@lemmy.ml 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm surprised this strategy was approved for a public server

The goal was to avoid getting hacked on a server that could have many vulnerable services (there are more than 20 services on there). When I set this up I was basically freaked out by the fact I hadn't updated mastodon more than a week after the last critical vulnerability in it was found (arbitrary code execution on the server). The quantity of affected users, compared to the impact it would have if hacked, made me choose the option of auto-updates back then, even if I now agree it wasn't clever (and I ended up shooting myself I'm the foot). These days I just do updates semi-regularly and I am subscribed to mailing lists like oss-security to know there's a vulnerability as early as possible. Plus I am not the only person in charge anymore.

[โ€“] yote_zip@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

I'm not a real sysadmin so take it with a grain of salt, but in all reality this is probably why you would choose something like Debian for a server instead a bleeding-edge distro. Debian quickly backports security updates and fixes but otherwise keeps everything else stable and extremely well-tested, which pretty much 100% prevents serious bugs from reaching its Stable branch. You may still need to figure out an appropriate strategy for keeping your Mastodon container updated, but at least the rest of your system isn't at risk of causing catastrophic errors like this. Also, Debian Stable does allow you to auto-upgrade security patches only, if you still want that functionality.