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Snowcrash
Asked: 2019-06-14 00:05:21 +0800 CST

Any harm in ignoring the `/var/run/reboot-required` flag?

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Icinga notified us of the presence of a /var/run/reboot-required file on various servers. i.e. we were getting a

SERVICE STATUS: CRITICAL file or directory /var/run/reboot-required exists message in Icinga.

We duly did a reboot only to find a couple of days later the message had cropped up again.

I don't recall having to reboot servers so often. I'm starting to think these are just spurious messages and we should simply ignore them.

Is there any harm in that?

ubuntu-16.04

2 Answers

  1. File /var/run/reboot-required is created when a security update to a package requires reboot for this update to have effect. In the last week there were two updates for the kernel, microcode update and an update for dbus, all requiring system reboot. If you didn't reboot then you are running a vulnerable system.

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  2. Are you by any chance automatically updating system packages?
    In that case updating some system critical packages will cause this flag to be set, but it usually doesn't do any harm to the system to not reboot, yet a frequent reboot is advised.

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