Automating Update Notification — NOT Automating Updates
Posted on August 2, 2008
3 Comments
With my new CentOS (Linux) servers, I wanted to be sure that I didn’t fall in to the trap of having them do any sort of automatic updates. I don’t do that with Windows servers and I sure don’t intend to start with Linux servers either! That way lies madness, right?
Most of my Linux experience has been with desktop configurations and there’s usually a little GUI notifier that lets me know when updates are available. That’s basically how I configure my Windows servers as well — notify me when updates are ready, but don’t do it automatically. (some of that’ll change if I can ever get into the WSUS stuff…)
This method works well for me since all the updates tend to go out at roughly the same time and I’m almost constantly logged into one server or another throughout the day. I know pretty quickly via the notifier when patches are ready and can plan accordingly.
The Linux servers introduce a bit of a new wrinkle though — I’m on them a lot as well, but not in any sort of GUI. Pretty much just ssh at command prompts. As such, I’ll never see the nifty little “updates available” indicator.
Fortunately, this is easily remedied.
There’s a service on CentOS (and presumably Red Hat…) called yum-updatesd. By default it’s the one that lights up that little updates ready indicator. Fortunately, it can let you know in other ways as well. It just takes a quick bit of editing the associated configuration file (as root).
The file is located at /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf and is just a basic text file. I edited mine and changed the “emit_via” to “email” and added a couple of lines for the address stuff. Looks like:
emit_via = email
email_to = my@email.com
email_from = serverName@email.com
A quick stop/start of the yum-updatesd service and my servers now politely send me email when updates are ready. This gives me time to check the updates (or wait and see if other folks are having issues…) before I rush into anything.
On to the next challenge: ACLs!
Tags: Centos, linux, patches, servers, updates, windows-update, yum
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3 Responses to “Automating Update Notification — NOT Automating Updates”
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I’ve half-glanced at a few of your posts as they’ve come through my reader and noticed you mention CentOS before. I promised myself I would try, but never got around to it - I was busy failing to get Ubuntu to like my nVidia card so I could see some compiz magic on my old PC.
Recently, I was surprised to find out that the ClarkConnect linux distro I now have installed was/is based on REHL via CentOS. Small world, eh? Go linux.
I’m happy to see your tips; I didn’t know that about yum. I’m loving apt-get and webmin, ssh console config is pretty nice, too.
What editor are you using/liking? I’ve only really used vi.
There’s only one true editor: vi!
I learned it back in the early 90’s when I was a Unix coder. It can be a bit arcane, but the “finger memory” has yet to let me down.