[SGVLUG] Ubuntu .VS. FC5 as servers

[Dustin Laurence]

On Thu, Aug 10, 2006 at 03:25:44PM -0700, Jeff Carlson wrote:

> If you can't count on whoever you are doing this for to do regular 
> updates, being able to cron them is a serious consideration. 
> Fortunately, that's very easy with both yum and apt-get.  I don't think 
> it's so easy with a system like Slackware

Actually, it is as easy with Slackware as with anything else.  Slackware
actually has a package manager, it just doesn't resolve dependencies.
But since they'd already be resolved when you did the install, you can
do security updates automagically.  I forget the name of the tool,
something like slackpkg.  You don't even have to use slapt-get or
anything.  It's only installing new software that you notice the lack of
dependency resolution.

If you've gone outside the system and installed software from source of
course that doesn't get updated, but it doesn't on anyone else's system
either.

> ...and I'm really not sure how 
> you would do that with Gentoo, but I have zero experience with either of 
> those.

Theoretically, it's also a matter of a couple of lines in a cron job,
and I'm not aware of any problems with that.  It kinda gives me the
willies for reasons I can't entirely justify, but theoretically it just
takes longer as it'll be doing an automated build during the install.

Actually *all* automated updates give me the willies, so maybe I'm not
the one to ask if there is any problem with doing it in Gentoo.  I
figure if the server has net access in order to download updates I
should be able to ssh in and see what is going to happen before blindly
doing it.  An intermediate solution would be to have the cron job do a
dry run (all the tools I've used can do this) and email what it wants to
do to you.  Then you know what updates are pending but nothing happens
without a driver at the wheel.

Dustin
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