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Keeping an OpenBSD system up-to-date requires two daily operation:
However, OpenBSD isn't very friendly with regard to what to do after upgrading: modified binaries should be restarted to use the new code, and a new kernel requires an upgrade
It's not useful to update if the newer binaries are never used.
I wrote a small script to automatically reboot if syspatch deployed a new kernel. Instead of running syspatch from a cron job, you can run a script with this content:
#!/bin/sh
OUT=$(/usr/sbin/syspatch)
SUCCESS=$?
if [ "$SUCCESS" -eq 0 ]
then
if echo "$OUT" | grep reboot >/dev/null
then
reboot
fi
fi
It's not much, it runs syspatch and if the output contains "reboot", then a reboot of the system is done.
It's getting more complicated when a running program is updated, whether it's a service with a rc.d script, or a program currently in use.
This would be nice to see something to help to restart them appropriately, I currently use the program `checkrestart` in a script like this:
checkrestart | grep smtpd && rcctl restart smtpd checkrestart | grep httpd && rcctl restart httpd checkrestart | grep dovecot && rcctl restart dovecot checkrestart | grep lua && rcctl restart prosody
This works well for system services, except when the binary is different from the service name like for prosody, in which case you must know the exact name of the binary.
But for long-lived commands like a 24/7 emacs or an IRC client, there isn't any mechanism to handle it. At best, you can email you checkrestart output, or run checkrestart upon SSH login.