[ANSWERED] My laptop updated itself!

[agmg]

Something strange happened and I cannot explain it...

I leave my Toshiba laptop on 24/7, mainly for FAH.
My main install (which me and my wife use for everyday tasks) is from KDE 2012.08 fully updated with kernel 3.2.18.pae.bfs.
In the past 4 days I was very busy with other matters so I wasn't able to spent time on it (do some testing, check for updates etc).

Yesterday morning and while I was at work, my wife called and complained that she couldn't start Bangarang to listen to some music.
She's not that into Linux and I was busy at that moment so I told her to just do a reboot.

I must note that I have "auto-login" selected on this install so it sounded strange to me when she said she was asked for password when the laptop rebooted. Everything was OK after that.

Some minutes ago, I fired up Synaptic to check for updates and have a go on the new KDE 4.9.2.
Did a reload but the only updates available were kde-pim-core and kde-pimaconadiconsole.
I thought, something is wrong... Checked my KDE version and was 4.9.2!

How did that happen? Synaptic has no history as of October 21. Is this even possible?
Checked user.log in /var/log and there is apt-get activity on October 24 starting from 04:13:48 (we were all asleep at that time).
I have "apt" running on startup, could this be the cause?

Have never seen this one before...  

[kjpetrie]

Yes. The apt service sets a cron job to run apt-get regularly and update the machine.

It's for people who want to stay upgraded without remembering to do anything.

[agmg]

I had the wrong impression that "apt" was only for checking for updates and (in conjuction with "update-notifier") to notify you about new stuff.
I wasn't aware that it also installs the updates. I must have a little more read on this...

I guess I've noticed it this time because I hadn't checked for updates manually for more than 3 days so "apt" did its job.
By checking daily, I was installing the updates before "apt"...

I assume it is not very good to have updates installed automatically... Or not?

[kjpetrie]

I don't use that script but have set up a cronjob to download updates once a week during my ISP's unmetered night period. Then the next day I have another which launches Synaptic so I can review and install them.

Unsupervised upgrades become dangerous if a broken package (or packagelist) causes removal of vital packages, which is a risk manual intervention might stop.

You should never do a selective upgrade. Normally you should choose to go ahead with it all, or to wait until a problem is sorted out.

[agmg]

Thank you kjpetrie.

I went through some older forum posts and read about the "apt" service and how it can be configured.

Your idea sound interesting...