I am not trying to start a flame war here, just share my thoughts on what I think a responsible system administrator should do before installing new software on a live server. Rick Graves wrote: > Hey, > > >>check-update sounds better than putting yum update > > in a cron job. Only a mad man would do that! > > Are the cAos and CentOS releases THAT BAD? I am not sure what you mean by THAT BAD. yum in centos-2 comes with a cron script which, when enabled will run "yum update" every day. This IMHO is bad so I made sure that it is not enabled by default. > > >>Much better to run a daily cron which rsyncs your > > local patch repository. > > So must one have your own local repository to avoid > being labeled as a madman? I said better, not must. I recommend a local repository if you have more than one machine which will require the patches installed. I recommend having more that one machine so you can test the patches on a test box and not your live server. > > In which one of the RedHad reference books can I find > this? Just because RedHat did not write a book about it, does not make it bad. RedHat actually wrote a product "Proxy and Satellite Servers". And here are some of the reasons for not installing rpm updates without testing: 1. back up your config files. Even the best spec files can have mistakes. If you have modified a file which is not flagged as a config file then you might lose all your changes. Spend 10 seconds and tar up /etc (and perhaps run rpm -V and see if there is anything else which might have changed) 2. unwanted side effects. Some packages can create annoying side effects, particularly ones which have cron jobs. sa and mrtg have been known to do this. 3. bugs. Many redhat packages contain buggy software. Often the updates introduce more bugs than they fix. stunnel 3.26 for example appears to work at first but does not work reliably. Mozilla has cosmetic bugs which means that some users lose their mozilla icons. Small but can still cause users to ring and complain at 2:00 in the morning. Of course, the thing which makes a good administrator (or any other role) is the ability to evaluate other peoples suggestions and decide for themselves what they should do. John. > > Just curious. > > Rick > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at caosity.org > http://www.caosity.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > > -- John Newbigin - Computer Systems Officer School of Information Technology Swinburne University of Technology Melbourne, Australia http://www.it.swin.edu.au/staff/jnewbigin