CentOS Linux release 7.0.1406 (Core) / Linux 3.10.0-123.13.2.el7.x86_64

Last week, I noticed that when I tried to restart, there was an option to Install Updates & Restart. I do not recall manually installing any updates.

Because this computer is for work, I would rather not upgrade software where a previous version is crucial for development... Or somehow make a mistake and take a day to fix it.

PS: If needed, how do I rollback to a point before Update A was installed?


I found out that in Centos 7 yum-cron has nothing to do with the "Install Updates & Restart" prompt. I don't need or want automatic updates too. After some tricky research I discovered this feature is provided by a gnome package "packagekit".

Three solutions:

  1. uninstall packagekit altogether (my favourite)
  2. disable packagekit from running (see systemctl)
  3. find PackageKit.conf (in /etc/PackageKit/ on my system)
    find WritePreparedUpdates= in the file (last line on my system)

     set WritePreparedUpdates=false

restart in all three cases (just to be on the safe side...)

More at: http://www.itsprite.com/linuxhow-to-disable-packagekit-on-centos-fedora-or-rhel/

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  • Thank you for the reference, and understanding my question! – onebree Jul 13 '15 at 11:31

This is most likely a package called yum-cron. You can removed the package which will remove the cronjobs as well.

If you need to rollback to a point before install...run the following: yum history find the ID of the action. yum history undo ###

of course sudo if you need to.

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  • Is there a way to disable auto updates without removing cron? – onebree Jan 7 '15 at 20:58
  • 3
    this won't remove cron all together. it will remove the jobs that are created for auto updating. – Justin Edmands Jan 7 '15 at 21:59
  • yum-cron was set up as a service in the GCP image I was using - very frustrating. Stopping and disabling it worked, uninstall should work too. You may find some details about it in /etc/yum/yum-cron.conf and in some of the /etc/cron* directories. As Justin said, yum-cron != cron, so no worries stopping/uninstalling it. – Burrito Feb 14 '19 at 15:52

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