Bogus message from automatic updates

Question

When I ssh into my Ubuntu 18.04 box I get the motd

1 update could not be installed automatically

Which goes on to tell me to check the unattended-upgrades log.

The log shows no problems. How can I clear this bogus message?

Solution

OK, it wasn't bogus.

Turns out the script

/etc/update-motd.d/92-unattended-upgrades

produces this message at login.

This script references

/usr/share/unattended-upgrades/update-motd-unattended-upgrades

which in turn looks at the contents of

/var/lib/unattended-upgrades/kept-back

In my case this last file was non-blank because unattended-upgrades tried to update vino, which I have pinned to an old version on this Lubuntu box, because the latest version removes the options dialog.

Deleting /var/lib/unattended-upgrades/kept-back made the message go away - but only till the next time unattended-upgrades ran.

But there was nothing in the logs that it told me to reference about it!!

Comments

[WinEunuuchs2Unix]

Fascinating :) +1

[Gilberto Albino]

Removing the kept-back file solves the issue, but it would be interesting to run "apt dist-upgrade" before doing so.

[crimson-egret]

So, it's definitely not bogus, but it is (was) a bug in unattended-upgrades, that was fixed sometime between 18.04 and 20.04. Basically, even on a successful run of unattended-upgrades, the kept-back file would NOT be deleted. That behavior is fixed in the latest version.

[Andyc]

@crimson-egret It wasn't fixed so much in my system (20.04). I too had to remove it manually. I did it after having tried sudo apt install <package kept back> told me that those packages were already the newest version, so I think it was just a bug/bogus message.

[reducing activity]

The same on my 20.04. Is there an open issue for that somewhere already? Or closed one claiming that it was fixed?