[326] in athena10
Automatic updates for Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (ghudson@MIT.EDU)
Thu Jul 24 15:22:44 2008
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:21:52 -0400 (EDT)
From: ghudson@MIT.EDU
Message-Id: <200807241921.m6OJLqvx028088@outgoing.mit.edu>
To: athena10@mit.edu
So, I'm thinking ahead a bit to the auto-update process for
cluster-type machines. I looked at:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AutomaticUpdates
In general I think our life may be harder in different ways than it
was with Red Hat; the dpkg internals are less likely to horribly screw
us like the RPM internals did on a semi-regular basis, but the
packages are a bit more likely to make assumptions about interactivity
than we're used to.
Anyway, my basic approach would likely be a cron job which checks if
anyone is logged in, temporarily disables logins, runs "aptitude
update" and "aptitude full-upgrade" with the noninteractive front end
and stdin set to /dev/null, and reboots the machine if there's a new
kernel. (Or maybe in more circumstances? I'm not sure how
update-manager decides whether to recommend a reboot.) But first, I'm
checking in to see if anyone knows of existing work in this area that
might do a better job than a homegrown cron job can.
