NAME¶

checkrestart - check which processes need to be restarted after an upgrade

SYNOPSIS¶

checkrestart [ -hvpa ] [ -b blacklist_file ] [ -i package_name ]

DESCRIPTION¶

The checkrestart program tries to determine if there are processes in the system that need to be restarted after a system upgrade. This is necessary since an upgrade will usually bring new system libraries and running processes will be still using the old versions of the libraries. In stable Debian GNU/Linux systems this is typically needed to eliminate a system exposure to a vulnerability which might have been fixed by upgrading a library which that process makes use of. Consequently, checkrestart is sometimes used as an audit tool to find outdated versions of libraries in use, particularly after security upgrades. Administrators should not, however, rely on its output completely (see BUGS below). This script needs to run as root in order to obtain the information it needs for analysis.

OPTIONS¶

-h,--help

Show the program help and exit.

-v,--verbose

Generate detailed output. This output includes the list of all processes found using deleted files or descriptors as well as the deleted files and descriptors found.

-p,--package

Only process deleted files that belong to a package, ignoring deleted files which do not have an associated package in the package system.

-a,--all

Process all deleted files regardless of location. This makes the program analyse deleted files even if they would be discarded because they are located in locations, such as /tmp , which are known to produce false positives. It will take preceded if used simultaneously with the -p option.

-b file,--blacklist=file

Read a blacklist of regular expressions from file. Any files matching the patterns will be ignored.

-i name,--ignore=name

Ignore services that are associated to the package name provided in name.

EXIT STATUS¶

The program will exit with error (1) if a non-root user tries to run it. Otherwise, it will always exit with error status 0.

EXAMPLE¶

Start it as user root without parameters:
# checkrestart
Found 20 processes using old versions of upgraded files
(15 distinct programs)
(14 distinct packages)
Of these, 12 seem to contain init scripts which can be used to restart them:
The following packages seem to have init scripts that could be used to restart them:
gpm:
3044 /usr/sbin/gpm
rpcbind:
2208 /sbin/rpcbind
bind9:
8463 /usr/sbin/named
openssh-server:
22124 /usr/sbin/sshd
ntp:
4078 /usr/sbin/ntpd
tftpd-hpa:
3417 /usr/sbin/in.tftpd
uptimed:
2704 /usr/sbin/uptimed
cron:
3019 /usr/sbin/cron
postfix:
22145 /usr/lib/postfix/qmgr
8892 /usr/lib/postfix/master
hddtemp:
3174 /usr/sbin/hddtemp
autofs:
2792 /usr/sbin/automount
openbsd-inetd:
3254 /usr/sbin/inetd
These are the init scripts:
service gpm restart
service rpcbind restart
service bind9 restart
service ssh restart
service ntp restart
service tftpd-hpa restart
service uptimed restart
service cron restart
service postfix restart
service hddtemp restart
service autofs restart
service openbsd-inetd restart
These processes do not seem to have an associated init script to restart them:
isc-dhcp-client:
3775 /sbin/dhclient

BUGS¶

This program might fail if the output of the lsof utility changes since it depends on it to detect which deleted files are used by processes. It might also output some false positives depending on the processes' behaviour since it does not check yet if the (deleted) files in use are really libraries. If you find a false positive in checkrestart please provide the following information when submitting a bug report:

—

The output of checkrestart using the -v (verbose) option.

—

The output of running the following command as root:

lsof | egrep 'delete|DEL|path inode' Checkrestart is also sensitive to the kernel version in use. And might fail to work with newer (or older) versions. A rewrite to make it less dependent on lsof could improve this, however.

SEE ALSO¶

lsof(8)

AUTHOR¶

checkrestart was written by Matt Zimmerman for the Debian GNU/Linux distribution.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENCE¶

Copyright (C) 2001 Matt Zimmerman <mdz@debian.org> Copyright (C) 2007,2010-2011 Javier Fernandez-Sanguino <jfs@debian.org> This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option) any later version. On Debian systems, a copy of the GNU General Public License may be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.