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?

Answer 1

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!!

Answer 2

I'm not sure if this it the right way, but after I saw this discussion, I found there was NO kept-back file in /var/lib/unattended-upgrades/ in my environment. Thus, I tried making the kept-back file.

sudo touch /var/lib/unattended-upgrades/kept-back
sudo reboot

Then,

0 update could not be installed automatically

appeared instead of

20 update could not be installed automatically

(In my case, the number was 20, not 1.) Then, I tried unattended-upgrades and rebooted again as below.

sudo unattended-upgrades
sudo reboot

After this, the 20 update could not be installed automatically message never appears.