#890381 unattended-upgrades: Upgrades downloaded even when on metered (mobile) connection

Package:
apt
Source:
apt
Description:
commandline package manager
Submitter:
Ralf Jung
Date:
2025-05-24 15:59:02 UTC
Severity:
normal
Tags:
#890381#5
Date:
2018-02-14 09:20:21 UTC
From:
To:
Dear Maintainer,

I just had roughly 20% of my monthly data volume (aka 100 MByte) used up within
minutes because this package decided to do `apt update` while I am connected via
Bluetooth and my mobile phone.  Lucky enough I noticed this while the update as
still going and before my data was completely used up.  I am not sure why the
download was so big, maybe it already started downloading the .deb files?

I did not even know that this package was installed; it came in via dependencies
and recommendations from Gnome.  The end-result us unacceptable behavior: Using
the Gnome desktop in the default configuration results in huge downloads being
performed over metered connections without any way for the user to know, let
alone abort the download.

Kind regards,
Ralf

#890381#10
Date:
2018-02-16 05:19:23 UTC
From:
To:
2018-02-14 16:20 GMT+07:00 Ralf Jung <post@ralfj.de>:

I agree metered connections should be detected and downloads should be fixed
but u-u is started by apt's timers, hence the issue should be fixed in apt.

Thanks for the bug report!

Cheers,
Balint

#890381#23
Date:
2018-03-16 18:42:32 UTC
From:
To:
Hi,

I have been wondering why my sid laptop is sometimes spinning the fan and
I've seen apt running in the background. I though that was only an
update of the package index and not actual upgrades. Then I've lately had
several odd system lockups on Gnome desktop running on wayland. And
crashes of various applications. Then today I saw that unattended-updates
were running dpkg automatically, which I have not enabled since this
is sid/unstable. I traced this back to apt daily systemd timers.

Why are these updates enabled by default?

To me it does not make sense on sid/unstable to enable automatic updates
by default. Even on stable I would expect that just installing some
packages does not automatically enable installing updates which may
break things on a running system which needs reboots and restart anyway
to make the updates effective.

And yes, I've been on expensive mobile broadband when traveling lately
and am a bit afraid of getting expensive bills in a few weeks...

#890381#28
Date:
2018-03-22 13:37:01 UTC
From:
To:
Hi Mikko,

The explanation is in the u-u NEWS file which was not shipped due to
wrong naming, but it will be present in next upload:
https://github.com/mvo5/unattended-upgrades/blob/master/debian/NEWS

On stable u-u is already enabled, jut like in Ubuntu releases.

Please run:

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure unattended-upgrades

to disable automatic updates if you don't want them to be installed.

I'm sorry for that, this bug tracks fixing this exact issue.

Cheers,
Balint

#890381#39
Date:
2022-05-29 14:29:29 UTC
From:
To:
Fixed by unattended-upgrades commit e4d0f0bb17b843743f83ff5ee696ce5de0ede435 "Skip updates on metered connections" (Jul 11 2018), right? Regards
#890381#44
Date:
2025-05-24 15:56:27 UTC
From:
To:
Hi!

As stated in earlier message
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=890381#39, this issue
is to some degree addressed in u-u ver. 1.4 with commit
https://github.com/mvo5/unattended-upgrades/commit/e4d0f0bb17

The commit message mentions that the commit fixes
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=855570 which is now
closed. Maybe #890381 could/should be closed too.

Kamil