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by e2le 289 days ago
The craziest thing I've discovered is that unattended-upgrades does not timeout after failing to download pkgs from security.ubuntu.com AND will NEVER release "dpkg/lock-frontend". It will happily keep failing to download new pkgs, NEVER printing any error messages that I could see to the journal or a log file ("/var/log/unattended-upgrades"), and preventing the user from using apt because it holds a lock that it refuses to give up.

The process doesn't even respond to "systemctl stop unattended-upgrades" or SIGTERM. Only "kill -9" ends the titan grip it has over my systems.

Edit:

Out of curiosity I ran a packet capture, during the 8 minutes it was running, unattended-upgrades (apt) received 4MB and sent 182KB of packets. Given the unattended-upgrades package is installed by default on Ubuntu and the "apt-daily-upgrade" timer will run every 24 hours ((archive|security).ubuntu.com has being down for longer), I can only imagine that there must be millions of machines reaching out, repeatedly and uselessly, attempting to download new pkgs without any timeout over and over again.