When it comes to your self-hosted services, what sort of attitude do you have when it comes to installing updates?

[firecat53@s.firecat53.net]

@zak On NixOS and have a service that updates all my desktops/laptops/homeservers daily. Rarely do I have any breakage. If so, a quick search most often finds the solution (either a config change, or a bug that already has a PR merged into nixpkgs). After running Arch for 10+ years and NixOS for 3+, I've come to appreciate more frequently updating as it tends to overall reduce the cognitive load of having to fix multiple issues all at once.

[mmeier@social.mei-home.net]

@zak I've got a two-pronged approach. I'm subscribed to release feeds for most apps running in my Homelab. If something is a security update, it gets updated immediately.

Otherwise, I've got a regular task to update all apps running in my cluster. I then sit down, go through my list of apps, look at new releases' notes and do the update manually. I quite enjoy that as a Friday evening activity.

Infrastructure, like k8s itself or Ceph, get updated less regularly.

[rachel@transitory.social]

@zak@infosec.exchange everything* is devoted via gitops and I have a renovate CronJob that runs a few times a day so I get emails on updates. A few services auto-update (the automerge step only happens after a few days delay, and never for major versions)

The cluster OS is Talos and I update it when I update k8s, or in theory if they had a critical security update (less likely due to small attack surface)

The small handful of misc services get updated less frequently but I'm not really worried about dnsmasq tbh

[rachel@transitory.social]

@mmeier@social.mei-home.net @zak@infosec.exchange do you manually check each application? Or have a way to track release notes for all of them?

[zak@infosec.exchange]

@rachel @mmeier I've done this myself manually just using my RSS service to subscribe to GitHub release pages. It works.

[rachel@transitory.social]

@zak@infosec.exchange @mmeier@social.mei-home.net I am subscribed to a small number of repos when I am also interested in pre-release/beta versions, but normally I just depend on renovate

recently I've been thinking that I should figure out method to check the age of each deployed image so I cam double-check that renovate is tracking everything correctly. A handful of times the project refactored and changed an image/chart name and the applied version ended behind by a few versions....

[viq@social.hackerspace.pl]

@rachel @mmeier @zak docker images have labels, maybe something got put in there?

[viq@social.hackerspace.pl]

@rachel @mmeier @zak when building custom images in work's CI, I used that to encode e.g. versions of various stuff inside, to make it easy to figure out without having to look inside the container.

[rachel@transitory.social]

@viq@social.hackerspace.pl @mmeier@social.mei-home.net @zak@infosec.exchange yeah but these are upstream images so I don't have that sort of control. Hmmmm, podman manifest inspect ... doesn't get me a creation date

Ah, but podman image history ... should do it! now to see how I can do that against every image in the cluster without needing to pull all of them

then any image over a certain age I'll doublecheck, ez ez

[cory@follow.coryd.dev]

@zak @faisal It depends on the experience I've had with updates in the past, but if major updates have been smooth I’m usually pretty willing to install them.

[jana@social.jsteuernagel.de]

@zak When I ran Kubernetes I used to manage all updates via a Renovate bot. Now that I‘m back to using a package manager to install most things, I usually just go in and run an update every few weeks, unless I notice that there‘s a particular security vulnerability there, where I will update early or, depending on what it is, temporarily firewall the affected service, etc.

[pionir@masto.bike]

@zak

As mine are just for me and not internet visible, I don't do them right away. I tend to wait until either they *need* it, or I'm at a loose end.

[mmeier@social.mei-home.net]

@rachel
For the security updates I rely on the GitHub release page's RSS feed. But when I do my regular updates, I've just got a page in my Wiki with a list of everything I'm running with links to the release pages/release notes.
@zak

[blakeashleyjr@fosstodon.org]

@zak I am on the bleeding edge, basically always.

If something breaks and I can't instantly roll back, it's my fault.

[woof@meow.social]

@zak I do it when I'm feeling up for potentially fixing things hah. So usually once or twice a month.

[rodrcastro@cupoftea.social]

@zak mostly leave tags to latest and let it update itself regularly (once a week). For services that are crucial to my usage that can’t break I leave on a specific version and keep up-to-date on releases. If a new version appears with improvements I want or need, I update. Otherwise I leave them be. Case in point: my VPN container. I never update it, whereas my Seerr container I keep regularly updated for new changes.

[zak@infosec.exchange]

@rodrcastro What are you using for a VPN that's containerized? Or is this just something basic that you've got on a VPS and you're using that?