Checking for updates was a request written into the same mailbox as a real
update, collected by the same agent on the same systemd timer — so asking what
was new was answered on the next tick, and the console, having nothing else to
show, counted down to it. An operator who asked a question was told an update
would start in 3:44.
A systemd path unit now wakes the agent the moment the request file is written,
for a check and for a run alike. PathChanged, not PathExists: PathExists re-arms
as soon as the service goes inactive, so a request the agent could not consume —
it holds a lock for the length of an update — would restart it in a tight loop.
The timer stays as the fallback, and a drop-in disables systemd's start rate
limit, because two triggers on one oneshot service can otherwise wedge the unit
and leave neither of them able to run.
The countdown is gone from both the settings card and the maintenance overlay.
It could not be made honest: its target was recomputed on every poll, and where
the interval the agent reports is shorter than the timer actually installed on
that host it had already gone by, so the fallback moved it forward again each
time. It ran backwards four seconds and snapped back to a full minute, forever —
reported exactly that way. A queued run says it is starting; a queued check says
nothing beyond its badge, because a check starts nothing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
07634c8a1d