Feature #15198
closed
System_Patches package should advertize on the dashboard, or send notifications, if there are recommended patches available
0%
Description
As non-full-time sysadmin, not only do I not regularly monitor the dashboard, I do even less regularly (read: never) look at the system_patches page to see if there are patches that need/should be applied.
It would be extremely useful if the package would notify on the dashboard or by some other mechanism (e.g. e-mail) that patches are waiting, this is particularly important, if the patch is a security issue, like e.g.:
https://forum.netgate.com/topic/184941/terrapin-ssh-attack
Had I not been perusing the forums for some utterly unrelated reason I would have remained unaware of the matter, and my system would remain unpatched.
Updated by Jim Pingle 3 months ago
- Status changed from New to Rejected
- Priority changed from High to Normal
This has been asked and answered before, tl;dr: Not going to happen. New patches come with new versions of the package, which is already shown on the Dashboard by the packages widget.
Not every person will always want to apply every recommended patch so notifying users about unapplied patches is out of scope.
Updated by Nazar Mokrynskyi 2 months ago
Well, it will show ALL installed packages, not just those that need updating.
And since most people don't want to show all packages (I didn't have that widget and I use pfSense for many years), they will likely never notice that there is any update.
I only discovered that I need to add a widget thanks to this issue (I was about to report it otherwise).
Even fresh article https://www.netgate.com/blog/using-pfsense-software-system-patches has no mention about easy discovery of the updates from dashboard.
And on top of that only from that article I discovered that I need to go to "Patches" section, I otherwise thought just updating installed patches package is sufficient.
TL;DR: Thanks for the great feature, but its usability leaves A LOT to be desired.