Re: automatic nightly updates

[Jim Popovitch <jimpop yahoo com>]

On Sun, 2005-04-24 at 14:49 -0400, Dan Schlitt wrote:
> I guess it is my paranoia from 15 years of system administration but I
> would never do unattended patching of any computer I really cared about.

What about a cluster of 50+ webservers?

I think part of this discussion needs to define what is applicable and
what isn't.  As has been previously stated there are cases when
auto-update doesn't apply, i.e. complex database servers, etc.  However
for every case that can be made against auto-update, there is an
alternate case for auto-update.  Think of an enterprise with 1500
desktop PCs all around the world.  Who is going to visit all locations
to update?  What about webserver farms?  How about distributed internal
DNS/NIS servers where the loss of one system isn't critical?  etc, etc.

People need to understand that every environment is unique and what
doesn't work in one instance may very well work very well in another.

-Jim P.