Re: Keeping hosts updated

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 19:18, Tomislav Skunca
<[email protected]> wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 16:12, Steve Holdoway <[email protected]> wrote:
>> On Fri, 2011-11-25 at 12:32 +1300, Jim Cheetham wrote:
>>> On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 12:09 PM, Jaco <[email protected]> >
>>> > multiple VM & baremetal systems (local & remote) for my setups; most
>>> > of them are Ubuntu, with a few Debian & BSD's in the mix.
>>> >
>>> > One of my pet peeves is keeping them updated.
>>>
>>> Two approaches work for me :-
>>>
>>> For a collection of Debian-like machines, 'apt-dater'
>>> http://www.ibh.de/apt-dater/ does an excellent job, combine that with
>>> a regular apt-get --download-only & notification and you're sorted
>>> well.
>> centos also offers yum-updatesd which will keep you up to date
>> automagically if you trust them.
>>
>> However, the question also needs to be expanded to keeping $CMS updated
>> as well in a lot of cases. I find that most of the big ones have
>> extensions that at least tell you that you need to update...
>
> You can try Puppet (http://www.puppetlabs.com/). There is a FOSS and a
> commercial version with extra features.

Disclosure: I am one of the core Puppet developers.

Puppet is awesome, and would have plenty of value in this situation,
but it isn't actually directly awesome or the "keep lots of random
packages up to date" problem; because it focuses on modelling the
desired state and leaving anything you don't model the heck alone,
getting everything updated would require you to model *every* package.

Most people end up deploying something like apt-dater, apticron, or
yum-updatesd, with it, and using that to handle the bulk of the
package update work.

One of our developers did build a tool over the top of our mcollective
suite that would find and update packages on any system that supported
Puppet though.  That was pretty awesome, but I don't know where it was
released off hand.

Daniel
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