Making Azure Update Manager work with Ubuntu 24
I like what Microsoft are trying to do with Azure Update Manager, but it's still a little bit... alpha (read: broken). One particular issue we were facing was a complete inability to perform updates on Ubuntu 24 systems onboarded through Azure Arc. When attempting to execute a patching cycle, we'd receive an error along the lines of "The list of sources could not be read".
Turns out, the Azure Update service enumerates all files within the /etc/apt/sources.list.d directory and creates its own just-in-time list of sources. The problem is, as of Ubuntu 24 (possibly earlier... I dunno, I'm a Windows guy), the list of Ubuntu sources is in deb822 format by default, under the file ubuntu.sources:
Types: deb
URIs: https://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
Suites: noble noble-updates noble-backports
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg
Types: deb
URIs: https://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/
Suites: noble-security
Components: main restricted universe multiverse
Signed-By: /usr/share/keyrings/ubuntu-archive-keyring.gpg
Azure Update Manager doesn't like it...
Microsoft have acknowledged this is a bug, and they will fix it. In the meantime, if you need to patch your Ubuntu 24 systems with Azure Update Manager, you can remove the ubuntu.sources file from that directory and replace it with a file in the original *.list format... here's the equivalent of the above in that format (I just called it ubuntu.list):
deb https://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ noble main restricted universe multiverse
deb https://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ noble-updates main restricted universe multiverse
deb https://au.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ noble-backports main restricted universe multiverse
deb https://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ noble-security main restricted universe multiverse
Like I said, I see where Microsoft are going with this, and I think it's great. But there's a ways to go before this is a set-and-forget Enterprise grade replacement for, say, SCCM.
Happy Azuring.
#microsoft #azure #updatemanager #linux #ubuntu #arc #hybridcloud