Re: Keeping hosts updated

> Rather than run all apps/services on a single host, I make extensive 
> use of 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.
> At he moment I manage to do that with a script that uses cert-based 
> SSH-connections to remotely run the update/upgrade/dist-upgrade 
> process, but this is not exactly ideal (for a number of reasons that 
> I'd prefer not to get into at this stage).
>
> Does anyone have a better way of doing this?

Redhat has, or used to have, a commercial service that let you manage 
the packages installed on your redhat systems. I think it was controlled 
via Redhat Satellite Server, or else via a portal on redhat.com

Ubuntu have a commercial service called landscape that does what you 
want as well, and it looks like it's either run from the internet, or 
you can have a local Landscape server installed.

Neither help if you have a heterogenous network of course, or if you 
have neither RedHat nor Ubuntu on your systems.


I trialled "System Upgrade Manager" about 5 years ago, and it was pretty 
close to being useful in this respect. Distro agnostic, managed from 
your own system, OSS. I ended up not using it because the issue of ssh 
key management was a pain in the ass (and I didn't have time to look 
into cfengine; puppet didn't exist at the time). It looks like 
development has stalled on it though. http://freecode.com/projects/sysmgr

It's only marginally better than your script though, I guess. It gives 
you a dashboard view of what's up to date, so maybe that's useful. You 
could always do the same thing with scripts and poke them into Nagios or 
similar to warn you when there are packages outstanding.

Personally, I use apticron and clusterssh to handle upgrades.   I 
haven't used apt-dater, it looks like it might be useful.

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