Re: Comparing update systems
- From: houghi <houghi@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 30 Jun 2008 23:15:06 +0200
Günther Schwarz wrote:
In my case it was still running from the previous try 24h back. The
updater has to give up at some point instead of eating up ressources in
an infinite loop as in 10.2. The problem was fixed with 10.3 obviously.
OK, I am talking about current software e.g. openSUSE 11.0
This would be too many mails here. There are several things initiated by
crond including updates of rrd databases which are done every 5
minutes. I do not want all of this mail :-)
If you don't want the mails (forwarded or elsewere) why would you send
them in the first place? What do you do with the mails now?
The reason this is done is it might leave your system unworkable,
because you will need to reboot. Not an option for a server when that
happens on a saturday evening and everybody is out.
But it should be left to my decision and responsibility. That said up to
now I never had a system in an inoperative state after a kernel update,
so knock on wood. But then I do not do automatic updates on the machine
that offers the vital services like LDAP and mail.
OK, so you do it manualy. Then for those machines you won't be using
cron-apt. There is no reason to run cron-apt if you don't want to do the
update in the first place.
The thing I run with is:
zypper --quiet up -y -t patch --skip-interactive
That way it won't install anything that asks for a license or a
reboot.
And I will never get new kernel versions or Acrobat Reader without
having a close look at the updates and what was skipped.
Not sure about acrobate reader with the update. The kernel indeed not. I
am confused as to what you want exactly. You run cron-tab at certain
times (say at night) and then what happens?
Yes, it uses the apt-get command which then calls the dpkg package
handler.
I looked a bit at the source and it is basicaly just a script that runs
apt-get if I am not mistaken. Just like you can make a script that does
about the same for zypper with very little effort.
Make one script that does that for you. Indeed it is expected that you
just use that you need. With what you are running, I am sure you know
how to put together a bash script that is able to do this for you.
Yes, of course. I did this for smart and it works just fine. But a
script that parses the zypper output correctly will be lengthy and
cumbersome to write up for the reason I mentioned previously.
No, it won't. I might not be as easy as one would like, but it is very
doable. Depending on what you want, you can easily do it in a few lines.
The sample output of the latest I recieved:
From: root@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To: root@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Cron <root@penne> zypper --quiet up -y -t patch
--skip-interactive
From root@xxxxxxxxxxxx Mon Jun 30 04:43:45 2008
The following packages are going to be upgraded:
php5-iconv php5-pdo php5-dom php5-hash apache2-mod_php5
php5-xmlwriter php5-mysql php5-json php5-ctype
php5-xmlreader php5 php5-tokenizer php5-sqlite
The following NEW patch is going to be installed:
apache2-mod_php5
^[[2K^MContinue? [YES/no]: yes
Yes, the last line is ugly and all the filenames are in one line. Filter
out the Coninue line and you are about done if that is so upsetting for
you. All in all I am pretty happy with the information.
From what I see both have about the same functionality. The big
difference is that cron-apt is already there, while for openSUSE you
would need to write your own few lines of code if you need to change
the servers often.
This is what I am complaining about. Zypper obviously is not intended
for use other than a simple and isolated desktop system. Otherwise the
developers would have thought about how to make it managable and usable
in a networked environment. No one has time to write scripts for simple
desktop systems these days.
In what way is cron-apt intended for anything else, because from what I
have seen, all it does is run apt-get on the machine it is installed.
http://packages.debian.org/sid/cron-apt
Contains a tool that is run by a cron job at regular intervals. By
default it just updates the package list and download new packages
without installing. You can instruct it to run anything that you can do
with apt-get (or aptitude).
I have seen nothing that makes it any better in what is already
possible.
And I write scripts for simple desktops all the time. The moment I use
two or three commands after another, I put it in a script.
Leaving the bugs aside the main difference here is that the person who
wrote the cron-apt package had networked environments in mind and
thought about a way to do things in a convenient way on these.
I am sorry, I fail to see where is does anything that would relate to a
networked enviroment.
At SuSE
people were thinking of isolated desktop systems (zypper) or
heterogenous environments (rug) obviously. One results in a focus on
tray bar icons and a colorful interface while the other becomes
interesting only in big networks running Novell's server software.
That part about the GUI is bull and you know it. We were talking about
zypper and CLI all the time. Yes, the GUI is an importand part for
openSUSE, because that is what many people now want. It however has
nothing to do with what we are talking about.
Another point is that cron-apt and apt-get are set up in the traditional
UNIX way were everything is configured via ASCII text files. The SuSE
tools are more 'modern' and abstract from the OS with configuration in
databases. This can result in better performance and give the
possibility to write platform-independent tools.
So this is good, right?
Rug is even a .NET application that runs in a mono environment and is
obviously intended as a replacement for the Microsoft updater on
Windows clients.
No idea. I do not know anything about Microsoft. The automatic updater
has been a part of the distro since forever. What they have done is put
YOU and Redcarpet together and out came rug/zypper/libzypp
So no, it was not intended as a replacement for the windows updater.
As a result both are much less flexible and harder to handle for a
sysadmin who is used to work the old UNIX way.
That is the fault of the sysadmin, not of the tool.
Editing files is much simpler and safer than using scripts which call
complex commands like zypper or rug.
Why would it be safer? Simpler? No. I think it is pretty simple to just
either do the setup in YaST for the updates or put the lines in cron
myself or if need be make a small script that does the different steps.
But again I ask what cron-apt does that is specificaly pointed towards
networked computing.
houghi
--
They say pesticides have been linked to low sperm counts.
In my opinion if you have bugs down there that are so bad
you need to use a pesticide, you're not gonna get laid anyway.
.
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