automatic nightly updates

[Mike Klinke]

On Friday 22 April 2005 16:26, Joe Harrington wrote:

> No, I don't think any distro enables them by default.  But
> Fedora, Ubuntu, and RHEL all document and encourage the practice.
>  Remember that there is a heavy cost to *not* updating, even for
> a short time, and the vast majority of users don't do manual
> updates, whether for lack of knowledge, time, or motivation.  So
> it's a matter of choosing the better of two evils, for most
> people, and hence for the distros.
>
> If you consider that the source of your updates is the same as
> the source of your base OS, you should in principle be happy to
> get any improvements.  Regarding non-invasiveness, anything truly
> malicious wouldn't advertize itself in the update email.  Also,
> wouldn't someone producing such a thing put it in the base OS, to
> get a bigger audience?  And in either case, it would be found and
> fixed quickly. You'd want automatic updates then for sure (of
> course, if the hack were any good, it would turn them off).
>
> --jh--
 

For me unattended updates are too much like playing Russian Roulette 
with the health of my computers.  I don't like finding something 
mysteriously broken and having to figure out what happened.

When I manually update, yes, it still breaks but it's on my own time 
table and there's usually an immediate cause/effect relationship 
unless the problem is very subtle.  I've lost count of how many 
times that updates through yum, Window's Update, McAfee's, etc. 
have broken something.

Good case in point from yesterday ... follow the thread.

http://archives.neohapsis.com/archives/fulldisclosure/2005-04/0511.html


Regards, Mike Klinke