Mk_apt and latest idea from Ubuntu

Troubleshooting
1

Hi,

the latest marketing idea from the Ubuntu team is to announce their pro support in the output of apt:

<<<apt:sep(0):cached(1664105717,86400)>>>
Receive additional future security updates with Ubuntu Pro.
Learn more about Ubuntu Pro at https://ubuntu.com/pro

Isn’t it nice to know that futurue security updates for Ubuntu 20.04 are only available through a “Pro” subscription?
The funniest part? The URL https://ubuntu.com/pro throws a 404 HTTP error.

Unfortunately this makes the mk_apt agent plugin and its associated check plugin stop working as this output is not expected.

Maybe there could be a more robust parse function be implemented that is able to ignore everything except for the expected information, @LaMi?

2

To remove the marketing output comment out everything in the files /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf and /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-esm-apps.list.

The package ubuntu-advantage-tools is a direct dependency for the packages update-manager-core and ubuntu-minimal and cannot be removed without these packages also being removed.

3

Thanks for the information about this issue. Very annoying!
We will have a look in the next sprint and hopefully can make our code more resilient to Ubuntu advertisements :slight_smile:

4

For some reason some of my systems have /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ubuntu-esm-apps.list and others don’t, either way I didn’t need to touch this one.

As for /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20apt-esm-hook.conf, I renamed it instead to e.g. 20apt-esm-hook.disabled, which also solves the marketing message issue.

5

I see this solution only as a temporary solve until a/the mk_apt can successfully filter this out.

Commenting apt conf and/or sources is from my point of view - as it is not under the control of CMK itself dangerous and can have unwanted side-effects on the monitored system.
Plus maybe in future updates this will be re-enabled, so the solution should be done in the plugin itself, not on the monitored system.

  • Glowsome
6

I encountered the same issue, but found a different solution.
Since this headline is not really well picked for google searches, I only found this thread after creating a forum account and navigating to the right topic.

Anyways, here is what I did to solve it, and it seems to work so far and also dont feels that “risky” in terms of going too deep into the core system.

7

Just to let you know. We are working on ignoring this automatically. I’m trying that this makes it into the next patch release. No promises though.

8

The fix is included in the patch release from today. Please give it a go.

9

Great, thank you!
For those who wonder, you don’t even need to update the agent or the mk_apt binary on the clients, there are only minor changes:

12c12
< CMK_VERSION="2.1.0p14"
---
> CMK_VERSION="2.0.0p1"
31,32c31,33
< check_apt_update() {
<     if [ "$DO_UPDATE" = yes ]; then
---
>
> function check_apt_update {
>     if [ "$DO_UPDATE" = yes ] ; then
38c39
<         apt-get update -qq 2>/dev/null
---
>         apt-get update -qq 2> /dev/null
43c44,45
< if type apt-get >/dev/null; then
---
>
> if type apt-get > /dev/null ; then
51a54
>
10

The change to ignore the advertisement lines was only be done inside the check file.
On agent and plugin side nothing was changed.