Hi,
I’m trying to track down why Discover is not updating my system automatically (relevant bug report).
The update-notifier-download.service has the following status:
yosuke@yosuke-standardpc:~$ systemctl status update-notifier-download.service
○ update-notifier-download.service - Download data for packages that failed at package install time
Loaded: loaded (/usr/lib/systemd/system/update-notifier-download.service; static)
Active: inactive (dead) since Fri 2025-03-28 06:56:22 PDT; 40min ago
TriggeredBy: ● update-notifier-download.timer
Main PID: 1700 (code=exited, status=0/SUCCESS)
CPU: 43ms
Mar 28 06:56:22 yosuke-standardpc systemd[1]: Starting update-notifier-download.service - Download data for packages that failed at package install time...
Mar 28 06:56:22 yosuke-standardpc systemd[1]: update-notifier-download.service: Deactivated successfully.
Mar 28 06:56:22 yosuke-standardpc systemd[1]: Finished update-notifier-download.service - Download data for packages that failed at package install time.
yosuke@yosuke-standardpc:~$ cat /usr/lib/systemd/system/update-notifier-download.service
[Unit]
Description=Download data for packages that failed at package install time
ConditionFileIsExecutable=/usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader
[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader
Type=oneshot
I’d like to dig deeper into why “Download data for packages that failed at package install time”, but I don’t know where to look for logs, since it exits with status 0, no error messages are written. Any suggestions? Or where could I find the source code for package-data-downloader?
1 Like
I’m having this issue too when I look into /var/logs. I see fall-overs. I’m looking into removing “snapd” and using manual flat-packs. Great show on utube about running a scrip called “unsnap” but moderator wont allow me to link that here. Just search for it. BTW I think Discover update is dangerous because they groupd all the microcodes together into a release update and there is NO-undo button. Even when you blacklist microcodes updates (microcode-intel and microcode-amd) still auto install. that’s scares me My old PC was bricked by this so be careful.
Because the service ran and exited normally? Though, what called it to run?
The status is completely normal looking to me, but I am no expert. It starts, runs but does nothing, and exits. Same as on my system.
Maybe this is a thing?
This service is part of Ubuntu’s update-notifier setup (which uses apt directly), so I believe this is likely unconnected to anything that Discover would use (packagekit) to automate update installs. This is extremely distro-specific (Ubuntu and those based on it), and on top of that, the main tool update-notifier itself is not actually installed by default, though the update-notifier-common is, as it has numerous scripts (including the one discussed here) that are useful for other OS components.
You can read the actual script file /usr/lib/update-notifier/package-data-downloader and get some idea of what it does from the code comments.
Source is here
2 Likes
I often do a quick status to see what daemons are running as with “sudo service --status-all”. I see things running that doesn’t make any sense like --unattended-upgrades I will just turn them off rather than having system logs fill up with errors. When I try to find out more details about these rogue daemons I don’t see any help pages.