After upgrading from webmin 2.652 to the recently release version 2.653 I have noticed a weird behavior by needrestart which runs automatically after apt upgrade; a bunch of services now require restarting:
This is pretty unusual for a webmin upgrade. What component that shared among these services does webmin have? ssh, fail2ban, rsyslog, systemd-journald, iscsid amongst others…
I’m almost sure the affected systems had no pending service restarts before this single package update.
I noticed the behavior on 2 systems, and put upgrading on hold for the rest of the systems for now.
Nope, Those messages are generated by your OS, ask your OS provider as to why your OS needs to restart those services, but as a guess libc (or variant) has been updated
I have reviewed the apt logs thoroughly, reviewing each update done since the last system start up, and verifying that it wouldn’t trigger such a restart. No culprit was found.
Anyway, I needed to get some feedback from community. So, thank you. The forum shows 34 views of this post (so far).
Ask your OS provider
I’m the system admin. It is my responsibility. I believe I’ve done the research. But I need to set up one more tool: An email notification when a reboot is needed, and luckily this has been discussed here recently, but needs to be tweaked to include LXCs and VMs.
No, I don’t.
And the same goes for webmin. Do I work in the webmin infrastructure to know each commit they have made? -No.
Hence why I’m posting here. I’m checking whether anyone else noticed a similar behavior to what I had.
as you can see no webmin update, lots of services restarted due to them using obsolete binary’s in this case openssl (I think) so as @Joe points out it’s not likely to be related to Webmin
Yeah, dpkg can end up with various state changes pending for various reasons; updates interrupted due to a package issue, or whatever. When you install a package, dpkg might decide now is the time to finish up those changes that were pending. Which is why one package being in a broken unconfigured state can prevent another package from being installed. It’s got some kind of transactional system designed to protect the order things happen. (I don’t understand it, just observed behavior from decades of using it and building packages.)
On a side note, wondering … how comes you have webmin 2.653 (on july 28th) while it has not been even announced on the forum and it is not proposed as an update on any of my machines (august 5th) ? 2.652 was announced 14 days ago, nothing ever since …
Weird … where do you see that “Webmin 2.653 and Usermin 2.552 released” ? I don’t see it in the News of the Forum, below the most recent lines of “News” … and my repos are updated ..
Ok so announcements do not follow exactly released dates … at least I see some logic thanks for that link. That does not explain why I do not have it in my repo but that’s another story !
Don’t ask when a new Webmin or Usermin version will arrive in Virtualmin repositories. It is always delayed a short time after upstream release for integration testing.
If you are using Virtualmin, you should not go to Webmin.com and download the script to setup repos. You should get your Webmin package from the Virtualmin repos.
I now figured out that it was a repo sync problem/delay but what troubled me was the fact that it was not even announced in the News section and people were already discussing about it … I’ll just wait for it to appear in my Virtualmin repo, no problem.
I’m the system admin. It is my responsibility. I believe I’ve done the research. But I need to set up one more tool: An email notification when a reboot is needed, and luckily 
