why is my debian automatically doing apt updates?

[Ludovico Van]

Hi all,

i have debian testing/unstable on my laptop. It's been 9 years without any problems whatsoever (thank you debian devs!).

Since a couple of weeks i've been having at every boot some job that automatically does apt update, but i've been unable to track it down. Of course, being the unstable distribution, i would like to avoid that.

In my syslog this is what appears:

PackageKit: refresh-cache transaction /8513_ccbddbed from uid 1000 finished with success after 41001ms

PackageKit: get-updates transaction /8514_bdddbcad from uid 1000 finished with success after 3737ms

uid 1000 is my user.

I don't have the unattended upgrades package installed, i disabled via systemct the apt-daily and apt-daily-upgrade services and timers, i disabled the desktop's updates via software-properties-kde (i'm running kde), but still the updates are running at every boot.

Any clues?

Thanks

[bw]

On Sat, 25 Nov 2017, Ludovico Van wrote:

> but still the updates are running at every boot.
>
> Any clues?

gee, do you think this PackageKit thing might have something to do with
it? I'm on stretch, about two weeks into the new plasma, the first thing
I did was purge discover, apper, and all the other windows clone stuff.

To be fair, it's not just kde doing this stuff, have you checked mozilla
autoupdate features lately?

[Roberto C. Sánchez]

On Sat, Nov 25, 2017 at 04:40:24PM +0100, Ludovico Van wrote:
> Since a couple of weeks i've been having at every boot some job that
> automatically does apt update, but i've been unable to track it down. Of
> course, being the unstable distribution, i would like to avoid that.

On my system I had to disable apt-daily and apt-daily-upgrade through
systemd. This command will tell you if those are installed/enabled on
your system:

systemctl status apt-daily apt-daily-upgrade

It was a bit annoying for me because like you I was accustomed to only
receiving update notifications when I specifically installed a package
(cron-apt is my pick), which I never did on my laptops. When I started
seeing the notifications it took some digging to find the cuplrit.

Regards,

-Roberto
--
Roberto C. Sánchez

[Ludovico Van]

gee, do you think this PackageKit thing might have something to do with
it?  I'm on stretch, about two weeks into the new plasma, the first thing
I did was purge discover, apper, and all the other windows clone stuff.

yeah, i get that, but the packagekit systemd service is of type dbus, so some other software must be using it to do updates.

My question was about how to find that. I have discover installed but periodic updates are disabled.

 

[Ludovico Van]

On my system I had to disable apt-daily and apt-daily-upgrade through
systemd.  This command will tell you if those are installed/enabled on
your system:

systemctl status apt-daily apt-daily-upgrade

$ systemctl is-enabled apt-daily-upgrade.timer apt-daily.timer

disabled

disabled

i think my next step will be to use dbus-monitor to check what is calling packagekitd.

thanks for your help

[bw]

On Sat, 25 Nov 2017, Ludovico Van wrote:

> some other software must be using it to do updates.
> My question was about how to find that. I have discover installed but
> periodic updates are disabled.
>

well this is one reason I like aptitude, here's what it tells me about
packagekit, maybe this will help narrow your search.

--\ Packages which depend on packagekit (12)
--\ Depends (8)
p apper 0.9.2+git20161222-3
p gnome-packagekit 3.22.1-2
p gnome-software 3.22.5-1
p gstreamer1.0-packagekit 1.1.5-2
p isenkram 0.33
p packagekit-command-not-found 1.1.5-2
p packagekit-tools 1.1.5-2
p plasma-discover 5.8.5-3
--\ Recommends (3)
p 0install-core 2.12-4
p libpackagekit-glib2-18 1.1.5-2
p software-properties-common 0.96.20.2-1
--\ Suggests (1)
i A libpackagekitqt5-0 0.9.6-1