[CentOS] Understanding yum automatic upgrades

Tue Apr 5 23:07:00 UTC 2011
Brian Mathis <brian.mathis+centos at betteradmin.com>

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 6:14 PM, email builder <emailbuilder88 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> 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.

Are you sure the updates are actually getting installed, and it's not
just noise in the log from yum-updatesd?


// Brian Mathis


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.