this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
56 points (95.2% liked)

Arch Linux

7777 readers
2 users here now

The beloved lightweight distro

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
[email protected]
56
Updating Arch the right way - Please critique my practices (lemmy.dbzer0.com)
submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

Hello. Please critique how I'm updating / maintaining my new Arch installation so I can fix anything I'm doing wrong. This is mostly what I could gather from the Arch wiki tailored to my system. I think I know what I'm doing - but as I've often learned, it's easy to misunderstand or overlook some things.

Step 1: perform an incremental full system backup so I have something to restore if the update borks anything. I've chosen to use the rsync command as laid out on the wiki:

sudo rsync -aAXHv --delete --exclude={"/dev/*","/proc/*","/sys/*","/tmp/*","/run/*","/mnt/*","/media/*","/lost+found"} / /media/linuxhdd/archrsyncbackup

I have a large hdd mounted as a secondary drive under /media/linuxhdd. It is configured to automatically mount from fstab using uuid. Both my root drive and that hdd are formatted ext4. I'm not using the -S option because I don't think I'll be using virtual machines (I have other hard drives I can make bootable). --delete is used so I maintain one current set of files for restore purposes. This keeps the copying and transfer time to a minimum. (I maintain disk images offline with a different tool - this is simply one local copy for easy restoration purposes)

Step 2: Check the Arch wiki - follow instructions for any manual steps

Step 3: once every 1-2 months, update the mirror list using reflector

sudo reflector --protocol https --verbose --latest 25 --sort rate --save /etc/pacman.d/mirrorlist

This should sort the fastest 25 mirrors into mirrorlist. Remember to use the -Syyu option in step 6 if this step was done

Step 4: Clean the journal

sudo journalctl --vacuum-time=4weeks

This should keep 4 weeks of files.

Step 5: Clean the cache

sudo paccache -r

This should keep no more than 3 versions laying around. Once and a while, I can clean out all uninstalled packages with -ruk0 options instead.

Step 6: Upgrade Arch packages with pacman

sudo pacman -Syu

I need to watch for pacnew and pacsave files and deal with them (although I haven't seen any yet)

Step 7: Review the pacman log

nano /var/log/pacman.log

This should tell me about any warnings, errors, instructions, or other things I need to deal with.

Step 8: Remove Orphans

pacman -Qtdq | sudo pacman -Rns -

This could be recursive and needs to be run more than once. Instead, I'll just run it once every time I update. This should keep things cleaned out.

Step 9: Update AUR packages

Check the build scripts to make sure the package hasn't been taken over and that it won't run anything funny.

yay -Sua

This should update just the AUR packages

Step 10: Remove AUR orphans

yay -Yc

The wiki says this "removes unnecessary dependencies" which I believe means AUR-only orphan packages.

Step 11: Reboot

reboot

Step 12: Update flatpaks from the GUI (Gnome-->Software-->Updates)

Any mistakes? Suggestions?

Thanks!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

TL;DR
I'd advise you to automate backups as incremental daily backups, automate reflector, clearing paccache and rebuilding initramfs/grub config.

  1. My system automatically backups at 4 am or boot time anyway, with basically the same command as you (also excluding games, caches 'n stuff).
  2. yay -Pw should show you unread news.
  3. reflector can be run as a systemd service
  4. For me, the journal never grew to a large size, despite not being cleared for any of my systems. Also useful for checking logs on systems where some errors may stay undetected for weeks, like servers (which I do run, successfully, without problems at all, on Arch testing repos. Even arch for arm works without any problems at all).
  5. There's a pacman hook in the AUR that automatically clears the cache to the last three versions, or what you want. My yay cache is ~60 GB tho, which is more than the rest of my system combined. Still not an issue, as it is excluded for backups and I can just clear it or change the limit.
  6. As yay basically just invokes pacman -Syu, that step is actually pretty redundant.
  7. Errors should be outputted at runtime of pacman/yay, so as long as you don't have 200 pkgs to update you could monitor normal and AUR packages at once.
  8. If packages are removed from dependencies they should be uninstalled automatically I believe and using pacman -Rs should remove packages that were only installed for the package you are removing. (Btw, -n removes config files too, if you don't want them anymore). Despite that, I do check for orphans etc. when I feel like I want to clean my system(s).
  9. Just yay upgrades AUR and pacman pkgs, as said in 6.
  10. Just as 8, orphans shouldn't happen anyway. Though I did not know about the AUR specific command, thank you!
  11. As I'm, not even joking, updating and "newest software" addicted, rebooting every time is very annoying, especially for servers. Luckily, as I update extremely often, it's mostly very few packages so I can quickly decide if to reboot or not. In general, packages like screen or python can be ignored. Packages like sshd can be reloaded by just restarting the service (systemctl restart sshd). Only kernel, CPU-ucodes and drivers are a real update trigger for me.
  12. I don't have flatpaks, and eg. pip is redundant as my python packages are managed by pacman/yay. So it's just yay to worry about.

Also, you missed a little but important step: Recompiling initramfs and the grub config (If you use grub, that is). If so, there's also a hook for that.

Of course, just automating everything screams for errors and system crashes - if not checked. I'd also advise you to check systemctl status regularly, as it can inform you of failed (critical) services, like backups, DynDNS or just shadow.service informing you there's a user missing/extra in /etc/shadow (which is the password file, btw).

In conclusion, many things could be done as service automatically, are redundant or could be done less often. Though I must say, it is better to do everything explicitly and with care, like you do, than to skip over things.