On 06 June 2001 10:44, Neill Newman [SMTP:neill@entora.co.uk] wrote:

yes, a friend uses cobalt and he hates them with a passion, are these the old non intel ones ?? or the newer i386 ones ?

Its a 386 Raq4 Actually a good machine in general. I beleive the OS is based on Red-Hat 6.2 from what I can tell. RPM is installed but only for addit stuff. Patches etc must be via the pkg program. I haven't used it directly, there is a page in the admin interface from where you can install via an ftp URL. This is a bit of a pain because I have to run the Admin Interface via SSL which slows things a little. I'll have a mooch around the scripts and see what is actually happening and try to get you some better detail.

...

Actually I fully agree with you. I have an little script which daily checks the update site. (though I only have it advising me if there is a change, I haven't worked out how to get the updates automatically by script...if anyone has played with a cobalt you'll know that there is only one route for applying patches.

I have to admit, I haven't pulled apart a cobalt, from what I can gleam from their website they are running some form of redhat, is this right ?? if so it will be very easy to intergrate auto updating into your scripts, if it dosen't use rpms and you can point me towards the package management docs I can soon convert any script to do what you want... I'm in the process of converting the scripts to use the pkg program in solaris.

be warned when doing this though, I usually setup a seperate test machine which the updates get applied to first (and tested!)... don't just update directly from the update site.. this is considered a bad thing (tm).... (remember tcp_wrappers!)...

...

If you're a bit of a wiz with scripts though I'd be glad to get some info off you.

sure no probs... let me know what's on ya mind ;)

Oh lots.... Will talk some more at the next meet.

...

Cheers Earl

Cheers Neill

-- Open Source Specialists http://www.entora.co.uk/ Tel: +44 (0)701 0723686 Fax: +44 (0)870 3214368