Re: OS patching via cfengine

[Andrew Stribblehill]

Quoting Thomas Glanzmann <sithglan@stud.uni-erlangen.de> (2003-03-06 10:20:01 
GMT):
> > On the same topic, but with a debian focus, has anyone had any problems
> > with debian auto-updates using stable (apt-get -q -q -y -u
> > dselect-upgrade)? I do it on some non-production hosts and my
> > workstation, but I've always been hesitant to do it for production
> > hosts.
> 
> I am using this together with some config files[1] to make dpkg less
> chatty.
> 
>         /usr/bin/dpkg --set-selections < /var/cfengine/inputs/selections
>         /usr/bin/apt-get update
>         /usr/bin/yes '' | /usr/bin/apt-get dselect-upgrade
>         /usr/bin/yes '' | /usr/bin/apt-get upgrade
>         /usr/bin/apt-get clean
>         yes '' | dpkg --configure -a

The FAI people (Fully Automated Installer (for Debian)) have exactly
these issues. They have a program called fai-divert which can be
useful to make things less interactive and doesn't rely on
re-compiling the package.

Furthermore, I notice you're not setting the environment variable
DEBCONF_FRONTEND to noninteractive, which I would advise.  See also
debconf(7) for ways to use your local debconf repositry for a remote
host.

Sadly, not all interactive packages use Debconf, but the number of
aberations is reducing all the time.

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