Re: automating apt-get
Received Fri 06 Feb 2004 5:18am +1100 from Deryk Barker:
> I think I'm on the verge of persuading our technical people that we
> should be using debian in our labs rather than RH.
>
> One thing that would tip the scales is if it were possible to
> *completely* automate the upgrade process.
>
> For instance: our techies would do an update followed by an upgrade on
> a central/test machine to ensure everything was OK. They would then
> like to be able to run the same commands on several dozen lab machine
> *without* any manual intervention (e.g. not having to answer those
> questions about opackage configuration etc).
>
> Is this feasible/easy? Is there a better way of mirroring a debian
> system to many others?
I think it is. I use wajig (which I wrote but is available from
debian) for something similar. On the lab machines you can configure
debconf not to ask questions and then run wajig daily-upgrade (perhaps
as a cron job if you wanted it fully automated, otherwise as a script
run manually from the central host), making sure the lab machines only
reference the central machine (i.e., the central machine is the only
one listed in /etc/apt/sources.list) which you can set up as a debian
archive of just the packages you've downloaded to that central
machine.
Regards,
Graham
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