I have several servers and although Cloudmin makes it easy for me to run the yum updates, it still takes up my time.
I wondered what people thought about automating yum updates, maybe a daily cron or something?
My concern is, could an update fail, or somehow bring the server down? In which case when the updates run there is no one there to fix it right away. Or is this unlikely?
What about just automating security updates, can these be done on their own, and if so could we still have issues with things failing?
Just wondered what peoples thoughts are on this matter.
My preference is to setup some sort of notification that updates are available, rather than performing updates automatically.
Although 99% of the time the updates run perfectly, that 1% can cause a lot of trouble if they’re being done unattended, and no one’s available to help straighten out the server
In Virtualmin, if you click System Information -> Virtualmin packages, you can configure Virtualmin to send you notifications when updates are available.
What I do currently is install all updates on one or two servers that are not very important (no customer websites) and if they go smoothly, then I do a few more servers same time, then a few more same time, until they are all done.
So lets assume all my servers are the same setup (there may be a few slight differenced like Varnish on one, lame on another say) so do you think if I run the automated updates on one of my not important servers, and then once a week I could login to Cloudmin and knowing that the updates all went fine on the not-so important once just select ALL updates for all remaining servers and hit update then walk away and wait? Thats not so bad. Its the time it takes to do an update on server, test, then another test, then a few more etc. Looking at ways to just speed this up, as I dont update them often.
Everytime I login there seems to be a squillion updates (well, 20 or so say).
