Upgrading over ssh and connection failure

[Chris Green]

On Sun, Aug 12, 2018 at 02:04:56PM +0100, Colin Law wrote:
>    I have several systems that I access via ssh.  When I upgrade using apt
>    upgrade is there a danger of the upgrade seriously messing up if the
>    connection goes down in the middle of the operation, while upgrading
>    the kernel for example?  When I say say seriously messing up I mean
>    something like ending up with a non-bootable system.
>    Colin

In my experience, no.  I have several headless systems, one in
particular connects over the proverbial 'piece of wet string' and I've
never experienced any non-recoverable failures.  I think the upgrade
process is quite careful about getting complete copies of a file
before using it to upgrade (not a particularly difficult thing to
ensure).

Failure of 'your link to the system' has quite different effects from
'failure of the remote system's connection to the internet'.  I have
definitely experienced the first of these and it did no harm at all.  I
may have experienced the second but that would be less obvious to be
sure about.


-- 
Chris Green