What happened

Our nightly auto-patching (a systemd timer running dnf upgrade ) deliberately does not reboot. On days when the batch includes packages like the kernel or glibc — things that only take effect after a restart — it just logs REBOOT-NEEDED and leaves the reboot to a human.

The 33 piled-up updates from my previous post included exactly that: kernel and glibc. Rebooting the production site follows a simple runbook: put up the maintenance page → reboot → verify → take the page down. The server itself is down for under a minute. Yet the maintenance page was actually visible for about 10 minutes .

The slow part wasn't the server.…