How to solve the problem of automatic package update in Debian system

I don't know when it started, but every time I turn on my computer and connect to the Internet, it keeps downloading data, and the status bar shows that the network speed reaches 1 to 2 megabits per second. At first I didn't care too much, but later my bandwidth was completely occupied by this inexplicable download and I couldn't even browse the web normally, so I decided to solve this problem. The following is a record of the process of solving this problem.

First, I used a real-time network speed monitoring program called nethogs to check which process was occupying the bandwidth. I found that it was the system's APT package management tool that occupied the bandwidth. I thought it must be the system performing automatic updates. After killing this process, I went to Google to find out how to turn off automatic updates for the APT package management tool. Most of the solutions provided by people on the Internet are the same: modify the APT configuration file.

APT's configuration file for automatic updates is located in "/etc/apt/apt.conf.d/20auto-upgrades",

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "1";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "1";

Change to

APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists "0";
APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade "0";

in

• APT::Periodic::Update-Package-Lists; Automatically run apt-get update once a day, 1 means enabled, 0 means disabled.
• APT::Periodic::Unattended-Upgrade; Run the unattended-upgrade security upgrade script once a day. 1 means enabled, 0 means disabled.

However, it was of no use. APT automatically updated itself again the next day after I turned on the computer. What was even stranger was that it would run again shortly after I killed the APT process. It was then that I realized one thing: APT would not automatically load itself into memory to run, there must be another process calling it. After opening the process manager, I checked the dependencies of the APT process and found that it really had a parent process called packagekit. I checked and found that packagekit is a system designed to simplify the installation and updating of software in Linux distributions. It provides a unified front end for different package management tools, and you can use it to manage software packages in different Linux distributions.

My system starts the packgekit service by default at boot time. Check the startup unit of packagekit:
cat /lib/systemd/system/packagekit.service

[Unit]
Description=PackageKit Daemon
# PK does not know how to do anything on ostree-managed systems;
# currently the design is to have dedicated daemons like
# eos-updater and rpm-ostree, and gnome-software talks to those.
ConditionPathExists=!/run/ostree-booted

[Service]
Type=dbus
BusName=org.freedesktop.PackageKit
User=root
ExecStart=/usr/lib/packagekit/packagekitd

This unit will be started every time the system is booted, and the /usr/lib/packagekit/packagekitd command will be executed. During the operation, packagekit will call APT to download the software packages that need to be updated.

Knowing these problems will naturally solve them. Disable this service: systemctl disable packagekit.service.

Or simply delete packagekit.service in the /lib/systemd/system/ directory (of course you can also move this file to another place and put it back when you need it later)

After that, the system never performed automatic updates again.

[Appendix]

nethohs is a command line tool that can monitor the network in real time by process. It can dynamically display the network traffic information of the process that is communicating at a certain moment.
In Debian/Ubuntu, use apt-get install nethogs to install it.
Or compile and install:

wget -c https://github.com/raboof/nethogs/archive/v0.8.5.tar.gz
tar xf v0.8.5.tar.gz 
cd ./nethogs-0.8.5/
make && make install

If the compilation fails, you need to install the dependent library

apt-get install libncurses5-dev libpcap-dev

use

root@zsimline$ nethogs
NetHogs version 0.8.5-2+b1
PID USER PROGRAM DEV SENT RECEIVED 
2181 mxsyx /usr/share/code/code usb0 0.449 0.900 KB/sec
1598 mxsyx /usr/lib/chromium/chromium usb0 0.031 0.018 KB/sec
? root unknown TCP 0.000 0.000 KB/sec

 TOTAL 0.480 0.917 KB/s

Specify the network card

root@zsimline$ nethogs wlan0 #Monitor wlan0
root@zsimline$ nethogs -a # Monitor all network cards

Specify refresh rate in seconds (default is 1)

root@zsimline$ nethogs -d 2

Specify refresh times -c number (unlimited by default)

root@zsimline$ nethogs -c 10

Interactive Mode

After entering nethogs, you can use the following interactive commands:

q: quit
s: Sort by sending traffic
r: Sort by traffic
m: Change the network speed unit (KB, B, MB) and KB/s

The above is the full content of this article. I hope it will be helpful for everyone’s study. I also hope that everyone will support 123WORDPRESS.COM.