Updating Ubuntu VMs in Azure

Question

Hi,
I'm currently running few Ubuntu 18.04 VMs in Azure but have small issue updating them from Internet. I know that Ubuntu VMs searches updates from http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com but the issue that the address is probably behind some kinda gateways / traffic managers so the IP address changes and because we are doing our networking restrictions in nsg by the ip it is hard to update and most of the times vms stop receiving updates (because ip-address of the http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com changes and the new ip is not added to the list). Last month it has changes at least few times.

So do anybody know are there some ip pools that I could maybe add to the nsg or are there service tag made for Linux VMs (there are on for the Windows servers, AzureUpdateDelivery (For accessing Windows Updates))? I would not want to open ports 80,443 for whole internet.

Answer 1

@Bombbe I understand you are running Ubuntu updates on Azure VMs but facing issues with maintaining a list of IPs in your firewall for http://azure.archive.ubuntu.com. Please correct me if I am misunderstanding anything.

Unfortunately, there is not currently an equivalent Linux/Ubuntu tag for AzureUpdateDelivery. One thing you might consider is running an Azure Firewall instead of local firewall. This would allow you to use FQDN filtering in your network rules.

If you are not open to using Azure Firewall consider using your own private mirror or proxy. This thread gives several great workaround suggestion.

Hope this helps. Let me know if you run into any issues or have further questions.

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