Re: Auto-upgrade packages?

[Finn-Arne Johansen <faj@bzz.no>]

Otavio Salvador wrote:
> || On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 10:26:33 +0000
> || Brian Scanlan <brian.scanlan@redbrick.dcu.ie> wrote: 
>
> bs> On Thu, Jan 06, 2005 at 11:14:07AM +0100, Petter Reinholdtsen wrote:
>
> > > Is <URL:http://www.sage-ie.org/slides/case_study/automation/>
> > > something we should be using?
>
>
> bs> This works extremely well (I admin two networks where it's used), but
> bs> it's not automatic updates per se, rather apticron downloads the
> bs> packages and notifies the admin that updates need to be run. This is
> bs> typically done using a script which sshes into a role-account with sudo
> bs> priviledges to run apt-get update and apt-get dist-upgrade... 
>
> bs> Requiring a human to actually do the updates is good, since if something
> bs> falls over the human is there to fix it immediately, and kinda prevents
> bs> potential hijacking of the process, in that a human is inspecting the
> bs> packages that are being upgraded. The apticron package certainly makes
> bs> it easy to know that your entire network is all up to date as it should
> bs> be (as it will complain nightly if this is not the case), I reccomend
> bs> the use of it in debian-edu.
>
> Take a look in cron-apt. It does the same of apticron.

not right - cron-apt gives an error message the next day - apticron 
(and the script I uses) gives a message of what should be upgraded. I 
have tried to make cron-apt give the same nice message as my script, but 
have not succeded Here is the output of my script:

 The following NEW packages will be installed:
  kernel-image-2.4.27-1-586tsc
 The following packages will be upgraded
  kernel-image-2.4-586tsc
 1 packages upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0  not
 upgraded.

Since this upgrade have been there some days, the line showing the 
donwload statics is not in this email, but I have not been able to 
configure cron-atp the same way. I'll CC the cron-apt maintainer and 
hope he has som pointers.

// faj