[Nolug] Updating lots o' boxen

On Sat, 2003-05-17 at 12:47, Wimprine, Thomas wrote:
> >> Having a 3rd party blindly modify my system scares most SysAdmins.
>
> Yea I'm sure it would scare most SysAdmins, but I don't know Linux well
> enough to know what I'm looking at otherwise so what do I lose. I have two
> systems one is an email gateway and the other is my laptop which gets
> updated MUCH more often. I've really never had a problem. (That I haven't
> created myself)
>
> >> The way many Debianite SysAdmins do it is to apt-get updates at night
> >> via cron in *download* mode, and then manually run apt-get to eye-ball
> >> what apt-get wants to do, in case (for example) and upgrade libc6
> >> wants to upgrade everything else.
> >>
> >> Takes more time that way, but could avert disaster if there's a bug in
> >> a downloaded package.
>
> Yes that probably would be better and would advert disaster. But what am I
> looking at again?

Obvious stuff. I'm not a guru either, but if I see where apt-get wants
to remove a package because it conflicts with a new version of an
existing package, then, when doing it the manual way, I have an
opportunity to pause and determine what to do.

> I still think RHN is the fastest and easiest way to update a RHN system
> especially if you can't get to it (console/SSH) to update it. If you know
> what you are doing and can do the apt-get or comparable action for your
> distro that would defiantly be better and much less like 'Active Update'
>
> But here's a question, what do you do if you have 100+ systems you need to
> update? With RHN you could update one system and test it, then schedule it
> for the rest. How would this be accomplished with deb, SuSE, etc...

Well, never done it before, but after testing the upgrades on box1, then
on the Other 100, I'd have mounted box1's deb directory via nfs, and
have apt run via cron and blindly do the updates.

[snip]

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