checkrestart – Is your debian secure after an update?

After the heartbleed bug that made everyone upgrade their OpenSSL installations in fear of hackers getting access to login information I noticed that more and more comments with questions like “Did you restart the service after you patched it?”.

Even if you run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade on a regular basis some services actually DO need to be restarted to benefit from the update. If the service is not restarted it is still running on the old code and most likely still vulnerable.

Debian has a nice app to check which services that needs to be restarted after an update/upgrade. It is called checkrestart and should be run after installing security updates. Install the app and add it to the maintenance and security tasks right away!

Installing is easy, run this command as root:

then check your status by running:

this is the result I got from one of my servers after the shell shock security issue:

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