[329] in athena10
Re: Automatic updates for Athena 10
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Kenneth Arnold)
Thu Jul 24 15:30:11 2008
Message-ID: <4888D816.4030604@mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 2008 15:29:26 -0400
From: Kenneth Arnold <kcarnold@MIT.EDU>
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To: ghudson@mit.edu, athena10@mit.edu
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There is also the unattended-upgrades package; the wiki page isn't clear
that they actually implemented something. I only know that it works for
security updates; I haven't looked at what it does inside.
-Ken
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.
>
