MJ Ray wrote:
I don't know of any web interfaces and it may be fairly easy, but not as simple as you might think. Some packages ask questions. I think dpkg-www may handle those, but I'm not sure. Alternatively, I guess you can tell debconf to never ask anything and hope for the best.
I think that installing recommended updates blindly may be better than not installing them. The "middle ground" of expecting an uninformed user to make decisions is not really an option (or not a better one, anyway!).
At the moment, I have a specific job which requires data to be logged to a database from an NT4 machine, against which reports will be run. I plan to install a Linux server with MySQL (data will be logged to it via ODBC) and use Apache/PHP to create the reports and make them available. The server will be hosted by the end user mostly for internal use, but with the web interface open to external users too.
One option would be to use an XP server instead (for many obvious reasons I want to avoid this!). However at least the client would be able to install updates (to the O/S, although not to the web server, database server or PHP). They may of-course download an update which breaks the server (unlikely but possible).
So, given that I want to use Linux, I want a way to manage updates. I could use cron-apt or update-apt, but I'd prefer to at least make the updates optional so they can be installed manually at quiet times in case something goes wrong. So all I was thinking of was something which listed the updates and offered the option to go ahead with them.
There are various systems capable of remote control, including puppet and cfengine, if you want to initiate updates yourself.
Unless I am missing something from a quick scan of their websites, these are both aimed and a sysadmin managing their own updates rather than as a way of managing vendor distributed updates?
I guess seeing as you wrote "servers" that the desktop frontends from the likes of ubuntu aren't an option. I'm not sure of the current state of webmin, but it might work:
I thought about webmin - I'm sure it would work, but it would be overkill and give too many options for "playing" :-( Yes I am talking servers without a GUI.
Of-course if I can sell support then I'll manage this via SSH but I can think of several other similar servers where this functionality would be beneficial. That's why I'm surprised it's not already commonplace, but a Google search including phrases like "apt-get" and "web interface" threw up too many false hits to be useful.