I'm trying to figure out ways our company can make their industrial computers running Ubuntu more robust. We use industrial computers in vehicles which run (at the moment) Ubuntu 18.04 (Desktop Version). We use 18.04 because our software is built with ROS Melodic, only runs on 18.04 and we heavily depend on Docker Containers for modularization of our software. An upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04 is possible. Recently we've been running into some issues with the OS that we then fixed either manually (which is bad) or through monitoring the situation via cron
. These situations include but are not limited to:
- OS log files (
/var/log/kern.log
, ...) getting too large --> running out of storage space
- Auto Updater running and blocking start-up of our software
- Sudden disconnects (one day to the next, no software or network change) between software that communicates via UDP on various ports
All of that has me wondering if there is a way to make Ubuntu more "robust". By that I mean a way that allows me as the user to be confident that, when I start the system for the n-th time, it will still work the same way as before, that no updates will be installed unless we want it to, etc.
One option I know of is using the server version of Ubuntu 18.04 which will likely solve some of these issues as the requirements for a server are similar to those of the vehicles (long uptime without failure for example).
tl;dr -> How can I make sure that my Ubuntu system doesn't "magically" change something overnight that causes our companies software (vehicles, industrial setting) not to work anymore? Any resources, opinions and hints are welcome!
Thanks in advance.