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PSA: unattended-upgrades restarted nginx in the middle of my stream (lemmy.world)
submitted 5 days ago by ultimaluz@lemmy.world to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Small thing but it got me last week. I relay my stream to twitch through nginx-rtmp on a cheap VPS, and one morning unattended-upgrades pulled a new systemd, needrestart restarted nginx (and postgres, and everything else) and the stream dropped. OBS reconnected fast but twitch counted it as two streams.

default timer is 06:00 UTC + up to 1h random, which is exactly when I stream lol. moved it with a drop-in:

# systemctl edit apt-daily-upgrade.timer
[Timer]
OnCalendar=
OnCalendar=*-*-* 13:45:00 UTC
RandomizedDelaySec=15m

the empty OnCalendar= matters, without it you just add a second time and keep the old one.

anyone else got bitten by this?

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[-] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 20 points 5 days ago

Unattended upgrade?

Why? Specially on critical systems?

If you do such upgrades, schedule for a time you don't use the system at very least ...

[-] Chewy7324@discuss.tchncs.de 10 points 5 days ago

There's few apps I can think of that fail when the service restarts. At worst Jellyfin and Home Asssistant take a minute or so to be available again. The former usually does not pose a problem because of client side caching while streaming. HA would be quite annoying, altough lights etc would keep their current state so it's unlikely I'd even notice.

That said I don't use unattended upgrades.

[-] Shimitar@downonthestreet.eu 4 points 4 days ago

Yeah problem is when upgrades break stuff....

[-] ultimaluz@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

it's a single cheap VPS that only I look after, so I'd rather get security patches the same day than remember to log in and do it, I guess that's the tradeoff. and yeah you're right about scheduling, that was the whole fix, the default timer runs around 6 UTC plus up to an hour of random delay and that happened to land on top of the stream. moved it to the afternoon and it's been quiet since

[-] NotEasyBeingGreen@slrpnk.net 1 points 3 days ago

I've been running it on a Debian VPS for years as a test. So far not a single problem, although I don't let it reboot on its own (I do monthly reboots, that I am thinking of changing to fortnightly).

[-] ultimaluz@lemmy.world 1 points 3 days ago

same here on the reboots, I never let it reboot on its own either. for me the reboot wasn't the problem, it was needrestart bouncing nginx and postgres right after the upgrade, which you only notice if something long lived is running at that moment, like a stream lol

this post was submitted on 19 Oct 2026
41 points (93.6% liked)

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