[CentOS] Auto-updates -- Bad Idea?

[Kahlil Hodgson]

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