On 12/20/18 7:50 PM, home user via users wrote:
Sometime after saying that what Ed suggested and that it worked. I discovered that it was overkill. I launched "apper", and it failed because "PackageKit" was not running. Having read the postings since my Dec. 18 message...
Right. As I mentioned, anything that depends on PackageKit won't work.
Having seen that, to do the weekly patches this morning, I first did systemctl unmask packagekit.service and then (after rebooting) proceeded to do dnf upgrade --refresh There were problems with python2 and hplip. But I assumed those problems were not related to PackageKit. (Let's leave those 2 problems aside for now; I'll get to those later. I am aware of the hplip thread.) Apart from those 2 problems, the patch worked. Apper and software also now appear to work, and I'm not getting any requests for permission to update.
dnf does not require PackageKit, but Apper and Gnome Software do. By unmaking it, you allowed them to dbus activate them. You might end up getting update requests again.
Let me approach this as a good software engineer should: *requirements* first! Here are my requirements for my workstation: The only times there should be any checking for updates is:
- when I manually enter certain dnf commands. In this case, the
checking should be a part of the dnf command's execution. So my weekly patches should only require "dnf upgrade --refresh", and that entered only once.
If you're only using dnf, then mask PackageKit, it isn't required. Also, turn off the timer as below.
- when rkhunter runs (I think it automatically checks for updates to its
database).
Unrelated.
I don't know how to determine if any other checking is going on. Do I already have what I want, or do I need to do one or more of what was suggested by a few of you: (Samuel) But there is also a cron job for dnf that updates the metadata regularly (daily?). If that's a concern for you, you can disable that one as well. (Ed) By "cron job" don't you mean dnf-makecache.timer in systemd? (Samuel) systemctl disable dnf-makecache.timer (Joe) systemctl stop dnf-makecache.timer (Samuel) Or run "systemctl disable --now dnf-makecache.timer" to do both at once.
Since you're willing to add the --refresh option (probably not even needed), you can disable the timer as indicated. With PackageKit masked, there should not be any other update checking going on. If you leave PackageKit unmasked, there are many ways to have it start up in the background.