At Wed, 6 Apr 2011 11:35:47 -0700 (PDT) CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org> wrote: > > Hello, > > As I've learned recently, I do not have any auto updates configured on my > system. I see some posts on the web encouraging the use of "yum-cron", but I'd > like to know what people feel about the use of automatic updates. > > That is, for a server (non-desktop) system, automatic updates could break > things or have other unforeseen consequences, and that could happen at the worst > of times, since the process runs regularly. > > On the other hand, for small businesses without highly trained sysadmins or > ones with enough time to baby their servers, missing critical updates to, say > openssl or some other mission-critical package could spell disaster. > > Is the only reasonable solution to schedule a "human cron" once a week to look > at needed updates? Ouch. I use the "human cron" option. It might make some sense to use "yum-cron", but the ideal way that would work best would be if the machines using "yum-cron" were tied to a local repo that contains only tested updates -- that is there would be developmental / test systems getting manually updated and then the updates would be tested. Once the updates have pased a QA process, they would be pushed to te internal / local repo, where they would be automagically picked up by "yum-cron". This covers both worlds: avoiding a automagical disaster AND automating updates across a pile of machines without a lot of manual labor. For small shop, just doing manual updates is probably best. Generally, basic CentOS updates are unlikely to cause problems, unless there is odd (non-standard) q hardware and/or odd software involved, so for many people a (blind) yum-cron might actually work just fine. It just depends on how much of a disaster a machine brought down by a update that happens to break something. > > Thanks in advance for your considered opinions. > _______________________________________________ > CentOS mailing list > CentOS at centos.org > http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos > > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 / heller at deepsoft.com Deepwoods Software -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ () ascii ribbon campaign -- against html e-mail /\ www.asciiribbon.org -- against proprietary attachments