Re: howto update automatically
Joris Huizer said:
> Hello everybody,
>
> I'd like to know wether & how I could keep the Debian
> installation up to date - and using stable progs at
> the same time.
check /etc/apt/sources.list and be sure you have some http or ftp
mirrors in there for the various sites, for updates ONLY depending
on how paranoid you are you may want to stick to just security.debian.org,
then when you see news of a new point release(e.g. 3.0r2) un-comment
the other lines and update/upgrade. I think when 2.2r6 came out I
freaked out because one system was upgrading a buncha stuff and I
had not seen any announcement of the new point release at the time.
my /etc/apt/sources.list:
deb ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb-src ftp://mirrors.kernel.org/debian/ stable main non-free contrib
deb http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib non-free
deb-src http://non-us.debian.org/debian-non-US stable/non-US main contrib
non-free
deb http://security.debian.org/ stable/updates main contrib non-free
the typical upgrade procedure:
apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade
if you want to do it unattended I reccomend something like:
apt-get update ; apt-get -d upgrade
then when your at the system run the apt-get upgrade (the -d
tells it to only download). Even on debian I don't reccomend
running unattended package installs, I've been bitten by at least
one really nasty problem when trying an unattended package upgrade
(it was upgrading SSH, which stopped SSH first then errored out,
preventing any remote access to the machine, luckily I discovered
it while running it on a local machine before trying it on a remote
machine, I was playing with an auto update script I had written to
upgrade about 30 machines).
> Can anybody tell me what a could way could be to keep
> up to date ?
> And, are there many changes on the stable branche or
> is it more or less, eh, stable ?
it is very stable. for some it's too stable so they use a mix
of testing, or move to testing or unstable. I personally don't
anticipate myself needing to move to testing anytime soon, stable
provides everything I need, with the exception of a couple perl
things which I recompile from testing. Debian is by far the most
"stable" distribution I've used to-date.
it's stable and predictable enough that on tuesday I was able to
talk a system admin from my former company through a dist-upgrade
from 2.2 to 3.0(there was some troubles upgrading cyrus, and the
sendmail I had on that server was severely hacked up, and the webmail
stuff broke on the upgrade). Took about an hour for everything, real
simple and the box was back to normal. He was suprised when I told
him not to reboot for upgrading to 3.0. I think that was either
the last, or the 2nd to last 2.2 debian box that company has left.
nate
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