[CentOS] Understanding yum automatic upgrades

Wed Apr 6 14:02:59 UTC 2011
Denniston, Todd A CIV NAVSURFWARCENDIV Crane <todd.denniston at navy.mil>

> -----Original Message-----
> From: centos-bounces at centos.org [mailto:centos-bounces at centos.org] On
> Behalf Of email builder
> Sent: Tuesday, April 05, 2011 19:41
> To: CentOS mailing list
> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Understanding yum automatic upgrades
> 
> 


> 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 -------------------------

A much more reliable way to check is
rpm -qa --last |less
or simply run
yum update
and see what it thinks needs updated yet.

If things are reasonably up-to-date I would expect the --last list to
have a tzdata-2011b package listed near the top.
One other thing the --last list will revel is WHEN the updates were
applied, if they consistently are at a particular time of the morning
then it may be based on a cron job.