Public bug reported: unattended-upgrades attempted to upgrade nova from 2:17.0.9-0ubuntu1 to 2:17.0.10-0ubuntu2.1 (bionic-security), however nova-common contains a modified conffile (/etc/nova/nova.conf) which prompts during upgrade and leaves apt/dpkg in a permanent error state requiring manual intervention. It also prevents other automated apt install operations from working while in this state.
I understand that this conffile prompt is a generally known problem and that unattended-upgrades specifically attempts to skip upgrades that have such a conffile prompt, however that did not work on this case. I am filing this bug to try and identify and resolve the cause and this affected multiple systems in an Ubuntu OpenStack deployment. rbalint advised that this is very likely a more complex interaction with the exact upgrades that were being staged at the time and hence more logs would be needed, indeed attempting to reproduce this very simply with a downgrade of nova packages to 2:17.0.0-0ubuntu1 results in it being skipped, as expected: root@juju-c21ec6-bionic-nova-7:/home/ubuntu# unattended-upgrade Package nova-common has conffile prompt and needs to be upgraded manually And from the unattended-upgrades log we can see that 179 packages in total were scheduled to upgrade together during this run. Attaching the following logs files: /var/log/unattended-upgrades/* /var/log/dpkg* dpkg_-l (As at 2020-04-27 16:22, the same time period as the unattended-upgrades logs, but the dpkg.log* files were taken later but also cover the full time period from before 2019-12-28 and after 2020-04-27). The first instance of the failure is in unattended-upgrades.log.4.gz Line 161 "2019-12-28 06:15:29,837 Packages that will be upgraded: amd64-microcode... [truncated, 179 packages total]" That relates to the output in unattended-upgrades-dpkg.log.4.gz Line 791 "Log started: 2019-12-28 06:25:56" Which relates to the output of dpkg.log.6.gz Line 392 "2019-12-28 06:25:56 upgrade nova-compute-kvm:all 2:17.0.9-0ubuntu1 2:17.0.10-0ubuntu2.1" It fails many times after that as anytime you attempt to install a package, it attempts to configure nova.conf again and exits with an error again. But that is the original failure. But note that various package upgrades happened by unattended-upgrades (and possibly other sources) in the intervening 4 months and so I guess reproducing the situation may require reverse engineering the original package list from the dpkg logs. I have not currently attempted to do that with the hopes intimate knowledge of the unattended-upgrades code and logs will make that process faster. A full sosreport from the system is available if more information is required that will include other log files, and various other command outputs. It is not uploaded initially for privacy. ** Affects: unattended-upgrades (Ubuntu) Importance: Undecided Status: New ** Tags: sts ** Tags added: sts -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1893889 Title: unattended-upgrade of nova-common failure due to conffile prompt To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unattended-upgrades/+bug/1893889/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs