MJ Ray wrote:
Neill Newman neill@entora.co.uk writes:
aarrgghhh how many times.. apply the updates and this is less likely to happen..(not impossible mind you)
That's all well and good, but what do you do when the vendor's updates break core functionality required by your users? One thing Debian *still* has my respect for is that its "stable" really is, while still having security updates.
I've heard a lot about debian, although I have never used it myself.. I've been using redhat since 3.0.3, and for the last 3 years i have been applying security patches. i can honestly say that things have only broken once in that time, and RH released an updated RPM a few days later which fixed this problem... (kerberos broke lpd ?? don't ask me why !! )
BTW, I'm sure this applies to everything under the sun (including windows), but this has to be done on a standard build machine, anything that is not part of teh standard build will be overlooked ;).. I think Yast (on Suse) has some fancy tool that looks for changes and notifies the admin before the changes are made.. does Debian (apt) check for changes before it upgrades ??
If you want I can do a 10 minute demo at the barbeque on how to make a machine install updates automatically if it will encourage people to do this... I currently have 30 or so machines doing automatic updates, and I have to do about 5 minutes a week to make it work smoothly, all it took was a little time upfront...
This would be good, although "apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade" variations are 5 minutes up front and then just looking over the output of the cron job...
when you have to start doing it on lots of machine (10+) this can get very tedious and time consuming.... on a large (er) scale you will need to look at some management tools (or make some ;)...
Seeing as this is pretty much a "misc" thread: I have discovered a RedHat 6.1 machine under my control. How do I upgrade it to 7.1? If it's a nuke and start again, I'll use Debian instead, as time is short, but as time is short, I'm quite happy to leave it as RedHat if there's an upgrade path.
download the ISO's, insert CD, and select upgrade ;)... there have been a HUGE number of changes between 6.1 and 7.1, a friend (die hard slackware bod) tried 7.1 and actually said it was 'ok', that's a pretty darn good response for him ;)...
Sz
-- MJR