[327] in athena10
Re: Automatic updates for Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jonathan Reed)
Thu Jul 24 15:28:14 2008
Cc: athena10@mit.edu
Message-Id: <BC59460B-D310-41AE-9237-CBABA98ABE4F@mit.edu>
From: Jonathan Reed <jdreed@MIT.EDU>
To: ghudson@mit.edu
In-Reply-To: <200807241921.m6OJLqvx028088@outgoing.mit.edu>
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Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:27:29 -0400
Along these lines, what will the update process be for personal
machines? Can users still trivially specify that they perform
unattended updates? I noticed that Ubuntu seems to want the user in
the "admin" group in order to run the update notification applet in
the panel, which might not be the case for someone who wants to login
with their Athena dotfiles.
-Jon
On Jul 24, 2008, at 3:21 PM, ghudson@MIT.EDU wrote:
> 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.
