rpm-ostree/docs/countme.md
Timothée Ravier f186840309 docs: Update instructions to disable countme
Focus on the timer disabling and add a note for the existing libdnf
issue until it is resolved:
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/libdnf/issues/1174
2021-03-22 14:08:23 -04:00

1.8 KiB

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DNF Count Me support

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Classic DNF based operating systems can use the DNF Count Me feature to anonymously report how long a system has been running without impacting the user privacy. This is implemented as an additional countme variable added to requests made to fetch RPM repository metadata. On those systems, this value is added randomly to requests made automatically via the dnf-makecache.timer or via explicit calls to dnf update or dnf install.

However, this does not work for rpm-ostree based systems as in the default case (no package overlayed on top of the base commit), rpm-ostree will not fetch any RPM repository metadata at all.

Thus rpm-ostree includes a distinct timer (rpm-ostree-countme.timer), triggered weekly, that implement the DNF Count Me functionality in a standalone way.

Disabling DNF Count Me on a system

To disable this feature, you need to stop the rpm-ostree-countme.timer and mask the corresponding unit as a precaution:

$ systemctl mask --now rpm-ostree-countme.timer

If you have packages layered on top of the base image from an RPM repository, then you will have to make sure that the countme option is disabled there until we fix this issue in libdnf:

$ sed -i 's/countme=1/countme=0/g' /etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo

Note that once you do that, those repository configuration files will be considered as locally modified by ostree which will hence ignore any other changes to the defaults that may happen via a future update. You can always restore the original configuration or propagate updates from the default configuration available in /usr/etc/yum.repos.d/*.repo.