I have recently installed a (Linux) Debian / Stretch Operating System, on existing hardware that I had, but an O/S version that uses Plasma 5 as its desktop manager, and that is officially a “Kanotix” build. Because Linux users often like to have the same level of comfort as Windows users, and like to be able to update and/or install software using the point-and-click method, as often as possible, Kanotix has chosen to use the GUI application “Apper” to manage software updates. This application uses the background-daemon “PackageKit”, to execute what the user told it to do, using the elevated privileges with which this background daemon runs.
But there is a known bug in this arrangement, which has just come to my attention this morning. PackageKit was polling the repositories for software updates every 5 minutes! While some people might think it’s cool, to be up-to-date about new packages, to within 5 minutes, in fact it’s not cool. And, if the repository-servers get the idea that they’re being spammed by continuous requests, they may even black-list the IP addresses that are doing so! So what can be done as a work-around, until the coders actually fix this bug?
One solution which people have offered, is just to uninstall Apper, or to uninstall PackageKit. But, I like to have the convenience at least to some degree, which this software offers. And so what I’ve discovered is, that if I simply set Apper “Never” to check for updates, the erroneous updates, with the wrong polling frequency, stop.
The behaviour has now stopped, with no more queries to the servers for updates, in over 30 minutes.
Tada!
So now, if I want to see a refreshed list of updates, maybe once every evening, I can just click within the Updates view (not shown above), to do so.
Dirk
