Security updates available but apt-get/aptitude makes no changes to the system.
 

I am running Ubuntu 10.04 Server in a virtual machine under vSphere. Network and Internet connection is good (can ping Google and can SSH to the server).

When I log in I see:

139 packages can be updated
94 updates are security updates

"apt-get update" and "aptitude update" seem to do what they should (hits for many urls).

If I type "apt-get upgrade" it prints:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

If I type "aptitude safe-upgrade" or "aptitude dist-upgrade" it prints:

Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing package states... Done
No packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 0B of archives. After unpacking 0B will be used.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Reading extended state information
Initializing packages states... Done

If I log out and back in I see"

139 packages can be updated
94 updates are security updates

Where am I going wrong?

I ran into this this morning. It turns out that there is recently discovered bug (April 19th, 2011) in the motd utility that performs this check. See this link: http://fossplanet.com/f10/%5Bbug-766...dating-125436/

The link shows that the temporary workaround is to delete /etc/motd.tail.

Ah Ha! I thought it might be old information stuck in the motd.tail file.

Thanks for the quick reply.

I renamed instead of deleting my /etc/motd.tail, just in case.

To check if you really have updates available type /usr/lib/update-notifier/apt-check --human-readable