Sorry if this is somewhat naive, but I'm a little confused as to
what
the
criteria is for that which will get upgraded automatically by yum
and
what
will not.
I see in our logwatch messages from time to time that yum upgraded a bunch of stuff, but I also notice that yum will not upgrade
other
packages at all (easy example is clamav, but there are others).
Can someone explain or point me to where I can read about the
distinction
between what is and is not subjected to automatic upgrade?
More info: yum-updatesd is running and I do not have yum-cron.
yum-updatesd
does a fine job from what I can tell, but I still cannot understand
what
criteria it applies to know which packages get upgraded and which do
not.
(?)
The yum-updatesd configuration file is ultra-simple, so that doesn't
seem to
be
where the update choice/distinction is being made.
There seem to be people posting in various places that they prefer to
use
yum-cron, but I have no problems with yum-updatesd and I suspect
yum-cron
wouldn't address/answer my question anyway.
Help?
Yum-updatesd does not automatically install packages (unless you configure it to), it only notifies you of ones that need updating.
If
no one is manually doing it, and you don't have "do_update = yes" in /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf, then you have installed something else that is performing the updates automatically.
It does look like updates are happening, but it's not clear to me by
whom.
do_update is set to "no", but notification is by "dbus", so I assumed
that
"dbus" is notifying another process to do the actual updates. Is there a
way I
can track that down?
Are you sure the updates are actually getting installed, and it's not just noise in the log from yum-updatesd?
Well, if I can take it at its word, updates *are* happening. Here is a
snippet
I clipped out of a logwatch a few months ago:
--------------------- yum Begin ------------------------
Packages Updated: php-dba - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php-devel - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php-cli - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php-common - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php-gd - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php-pdo - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386 php-mysql - 5.1.6-27.el5_5.3.i386
---------------------- yum End -------------------------
P.S. The yum log doesn't have the year in the timestamp, and if it's not active it might not get rotated by logrotate. This can cause false messages sent from logwatch about packages that were installed last year.
Hmm, is there a known fix for this?
Rotate the log file yourself once a year. You can check if you are seeing this bug by looking at the /var/log/yum.log last modified time. If it was yesterday, then I suppose the packages were installed.
As far as your other questions, how does it determine what packages to update, I think you will find it's not actually doing any updating. I have not used yum-updatesd to auto-update packages myself, but I would think it would automatically install any updated package.
It's dated a couple days ago, so I'd say it's doing what it's supposed to. I'm
not sure what the "dbus" notification does, but I presume it's telling someone
to do the updating. It'd probably be more informative if I could understand who
is picking up such notifications.
/etc/dbus-1/system.d/yum-updatesd.conf
Doesn't really tell me anything. I'm guessing that someone is watching dbus for notifications, but I can't figure out how to see who that is.
Do you know how to determine which repo a particular package is from? For example, when I do "yum info" against clamav (which isn't receiving automatic
updates), it just says "Repo: installed". I don't know what repo it comes from.