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coreos/rpm-ostree

DNF Count Me support

Classic DNF based operating systems can use the DNF Count Me feature to anonymously report how long a system has been running without impacting the user privacy. This is implemented as an additional countme variable added to requests made to fetch RPM repository metadata. On those systems, this value is added randomly to requests made automatically via the dnf-makecache.timer or via explicit calls to dnf update or dnf install.

However, this does not work for rpm-ostree based systems as in the default case (no package overlayed on top of the base commit), rpm-ostree will not fetch any RPM repository metadata at all.

Thus rpm-ostree includes a distinct timer (rpm-ostree-countme.timer) that implements the DNF Count Me functionality in a standalone way. This timer is triggered on boot after 5 minutes and bi-weekly, in both cases with a random delay.

Disabling DNF Count Me on a system

To disable this feature, you need to stop the rpm-ostree-countme.timer and mask the corresponding unit as a precaution:

$ systemctl mask --now rpm-ostree-countme.timer

References