On 07/04/11 05:34, Les Mikesell wrote: >> Is the only reasonable solution to schedule a "human cron" once a week to look >> at needed updates? Ouch. > > A middle-of-the-road approach is to have a machine or VM where you can > test things, perhaps the one you use as your own desktop or for > development, where you have all the packages installed that the other > systems use. You can 'yum update' this one frequently, noting what > packages are affected and that everything still works after a reboot > (for things where that might make a difference). I use a VM set up this way with the following crontab: # check for yum updates every 12 hours 5 0,12 * * * root /usr/bin/yum -q check-update 2>/dev/null so I get an email whenever there's any updates due. I can then evaluate, test, and (perhaps) schedule a time to manually update the production servers. Kal