Automatically update flashplayer-plugin

Posted 07-11-2015 at 04:03 PM by jere21
Updated 07-20-2015 at 08:13 PM by jere21

Code:

ii  flashplugin-nonfree  1:3.6.1  amd64  Adobe Flash Player - browser plugin

Debian doesn't update the flashplayer-plugin automatically to avoid downloading an unchecked 3rd party proprietary binary. If you want to ignore that risk for convenience do the following:

/usr/local/bin/flash-update.sh

Code:

#!/bin/sh
update-flashplugin-nonfree --install

/etc/systemd/system/flash-update.service

Code:

[Unit]
Description=update-flashplugin-nonfree
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
Type=simple
ExecStart=/usr/local/bin/flash-update.sh

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

/etc/systemd/system/flash-update.timer

Code:

[Unit]
Description=Run flash-update(.service) regularly

[Timer]
# Time to wait after booting before we run first time
OnBootSec=1min

# Time between running each consecutive time
OnUnitActiveSec=12h
Unit=flash-update.service

[Install]
WantedBy=flash-update.service

Enable (on boot) and start the timer (immediately):

Code:

sudo systemctl enable flash-update.service 
# Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/multi-user.target.wants/flash-update.service to /etc/systemd/system/flash-update.service.
sudo systemctl enable flash-update.timer
# Created symlink from /etc/systemd/system/flash-update.service.wants/flash-update.timer to /etc/systemd/system/flash-update.timer.
sudo systemctl start flash-update.timer

Check if it is working:

Code:

sudo update-flashplugin-nonfree --status
sudo systemctl list-timers

In the output of the latter a line for the UNIT flash-update.timer should show the last passed and next run time.

Edit 2015-07-15: Need to also enable the service (not just the timer), for the timer to start automatically at boot.

Posted in Uncategorized

Views 1696 Comments 2

« Prev Main Next »

Total Comments 2

Comments

Thank you for posting this, jere21. One question: why not just use cron? I understand systemd might be nice for debugging complex situations, but for something as trivial as this, cron works just as well and is much simpler, no?

This is especially easy on a Debian system where one can simply create a shell script in /etc/cron.daily/ and know that it'll be run once a day without needing to enable any craziness.

Code:

echo '/usr/sbin/update-flashplugin-nonfree --install' > update-flash
chmod 755 update-flash
sudo mv update-flash /etc/cron.daily/

Cut and paste the above into a terminal, and flash will be updated every night around 3am.

Posted 03-21-2016 at 11:43 AM by hackerb9 hackerb9 is offline

	Quote: Originally Posted by hackerb9 One question: why not just use cron? Sure. I just wanted to play directly with systemd. Just because
	Posted 03-21-2016 at 12:06 PM by jere21