[CentOS] Auto-updates -- Bad Idea?

[email builder]

> >>    Is the only  reasonable solution to schedule a "human cron" once a week 
>to look
> >>  at needed updates?  Ouch.
> > 
> > A middle-of-the-road approach is  to have a machine or VM where you can 
> > test things, perhaps the one you  use as your own desktop or for 
> > development, where you have all the  packages installed that the other 
> > systems use.  You can 'yum  update' this one frequently, noting what 
> > packages are affected and that  everything still works after a reboot 
> > (for things where that might make  a difference). 
> 
> I use a VM set up this way with the following  crontab:
> 
> # check for yum updates every 12 hours
> 5 0,12 * * * root  /usr/bin/yum -q check-update 2>/dev/null
> 
> so I get an email whenever  there's any updates due.  I can then
> evaluate, test, and (perhaps)  schedule a time to manually update the
> production  servers.

The yum-updatesd package does all of this.  Its config file is pretty simple and 
has your choice of whether to download, whether to install, and where updates 
should go.