Trying out 'unattended upgrades' to replace cron-apt

A while back I posted about a problem I was having with my auto update process sometimes getting hung up reinstalling a kernel update over and over. A reader left a comment about not having a similar problem with the "unattended upgrades" paclage.

I poked around the net, but could not find a lot of information about this package. The best information I found was this blog post on vanutsteen.nl, which was enough to go on.

At this point I've installed unattended upgrades on one of my virtual machines. I haven't noticed any difference so far, but I haven't had a kernel upgrade such as the one that caused my problems, so I'm in a waiting mode now.

Here is what I did to install unattended upgrades, based on the vanutsteen.nl post.

First, install the package and got rid of cron-apt:

# apt-get install unattended-upgrades update-notifier-common
# apt-get remove cron-apt

Then I edited /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/50unattended-upgrades and uncommented the following line:

"Ubuntu intrepid-updates";

Then I edited /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/10periodic to look like:

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Download-Upgradeable-Packages "1";
APT::Periodic::AutocleanInterval "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

That's it. I'll post again when I come to some conclusion about unattended upgrades vs cron-apt.