How do I enable nightly yum?

Erin D. Hughes erin at erinhughes.com
Thu May 19 15:12:22 UTC 2005


John Summerfied wrote:
> Rick Stevens wrote:
> 
>>
>>> I would have thought a daily (or rather nightly) cron job
>>> running "yum -y update" would be what most people would want,
>>> at least on a desktop.
>>
>>
>>
>> Yes, that's one way.  Don't forget to do "yum -y update >/dev/null 2>&1"
>> unless you want mail sent to root everytime it runs.
> 
> 
> I think running yum to automatically update your is a particularly 
> effective way of getting your system screwed without you knowing why,
> 
> Diverting all the output to /dev/null compounds the problem because it 
> discards some of the evidence.
> 
> How likely is it that a particular update is broken?
>     Quite low, but not impossible.
> How likely is it that there will be a serious problem with an updated?
>     Almost certain.
> 
> There has been a recent kernel update providing a kernel that does not 
> work on some systems. On mine, it would not shut down cleanly so I was 
> forced to cycle power (no reset button) to reboot. Others had problems 
> booting. Worse, the new-kernel policy is the latest-installed is the 
> default.
> 
> glibc and rpm both have the ability to bork the entire system.
> 
> I have no problem with running a tool to download updates regularly, but 
> I _will not_ apply them automatically. I do it manually so that then I 
> know something's changed.
> 
> up2date has the ability to download and _not_ apply updates: I did that 
> on taroon beta.
> apt-get has the ability to download and _not_ apply updates. I do that 
> on my several Debian systems.
> 
> yum has not this ability and so IMV is ill-suited to the task of 
> maintaining one's software where automation is desired.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
John,

I agree 50% with you but,  I have to say that I like > love automation 
it gives me time to solve other problems.

That said line 3 in your yum.conf would show you something like
logfile=/var/log/yum.log

in there we see stuff like
04/14/05 00:09:25 Dep Installed: tcl 8.4.5-7.i386
04/14/05 00:09:25 Dep Installed: postgresql 7.4.7-3.FC2.1.i386
04/14/05 00:09:25 Updated: postgresql-docs 7.4.7-3.FC2.1.i386
04/15/05 00:45:58 Updated: postgresql-jdbc 7.4.7-3.FC2.1.i386
04/19/05 20:17:07 Erased: mod_python 3.1.3-1.fc2.2.i386
05/07/05 09:23:23 Erased: mailman 3:2.1.5-10.fc2.i386
05/07/05 09:24:36 Updated: clamav-milter 81:0.84-1.i386
05/07/05 09:24:36 Updated: clamav-devel 81:0.84-1.i386
05/07/05 09:24:36 Updated: clamav 81:0.84-1.i386

Just enough to give you information on what the problem might be..... 
that mixed with a quick look at messages log or the system log .... ya 
your about 3 minutes away from goggling the answer to your problems.

Also you can comment out if you do not wish to do kernel upgrades or 
anything else, yum is a little more flexible in that. Sans your download 
argument.

Erin

----

Forgive the poster for any stupid comments it is late he has undoubtebly 
been drinking and his views and opinions will probably change in the 
morning around 8 AM JST.




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