[CentOS] running yum update on remote servers

Mon Feb 25 16:33:23 UTC 2013
Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at gmail.com>

On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 9:08 AM, Robert Moskowitz <rgm at htt-consult.com> wrote:
>
>>> Then there is the actual update.  I learned long ago NOT to run yum over
>>> an SSH connection, as WHEN that connection breaks in the middle of an
>>> update, you can have quite a problem to clean up.  All I have done
>> That sounds, to me, as though you have very serious communications issues
>> that need to be solved, and yesterday. We've used ssh here, and at my
>> previous two? three? contracts, for years, and almost *never* have an ssh
>> connection break.
>
> Oh, it has rarely happened.  Typically when I was at a conference, using
> their wifi, to reach home to fix something.  Though once or twice my
> system I was working from decided to go south and then of course there
> went its ssh connections.  No once long ago when my firewall was a
> Centos (4?) system running shorewall, it happened that my notebook hung
> and recovery was a task and a half.  Burned once and all that.

If you are going to baby-sit the actual updates,  I recommend
installing the yum-plugin-downloadonly package.  Then before you
manually connect to watch it run, you can script a stack of 'ssh
target_host yum -y --downloadonly update' for all your targets.   That
will figure out what updates you need and download to the yum cache
directory but not install them.    Then when you log in and run 'yum
update' you'll still see the list and have a chance to cancel, but the
download step is instant since the rpms are already there.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com