pretty up2date vs reliable yum?

[Scot L. Harris]

On Tue, 2005-01-25 at 13:58, Matt Morgan wrote:

> 
> Lots of other good answers to this already; but here's one that I
> haven't seen. Updating is something you should never have to worry
> about yourself, so a GUI shouldn't be necessary. Clearly you may want
> it for special installs, but for literal updates, why be bothered at
> all?
> 
> Indeed, once yum is set up correctly (which is quick and easy), it's
> very automatic. In fact, in a default FC install, cron will be set up
> automatically to run yum updates nightly, and anacron will take over
> on computers that aren't powered on all the time. So the GUI is just
> not something I ever have to worry about in this case (although in
> general I am a GUI kind of guy).


IMHO automatic updates may be fine for home users, and for home users
should probably be the default.  But for production level
systems/servers I would never permit automatic updates.  First problem
is having an updated package knock your service down or worse cause your
system to lose data.  Second problem is security.  If the particular
mirror being used happens to get compromised then you could have dozens
if not hundreds of systems running trojan software which reports back to
the person that compromised the mirror.

Taking a few minutes to review security updates and package updates is
worth it.  In a true production environment one would never auto update
the production system.  Such changes would be done on a staging
environment and testing performed to make sure everything works as
expected.  Then a planned roll out of the updates can be scheduled.

Don't get me wrong, for the most part auto updates have not appeared to
cause many problems.  But all it takes is once. :)

-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Q:	What do you say to a New Yorker with a job?
A:	Big Mac, fries and a Coke, please!