Update notifier.

On Sun, Oct 16, 2005 at 11:19:10AM -0700, George Farris wrote:
> On Sun, 2005-10-16 at 14:04 +1000, Matthew Palmer wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 15, 2005 at 05:40:29PM -0700, George Farris wrote:
> > > Something that would be really great for Dapper would be the ability for
> > > the update notifier to communicate to other servers and receive update
> > > notifications from them.
> > > 
> > > That way if you had a couple of Dapper servers and a Dapper+1
> > > workstation you could receive notifications from the servers that there
> > > are updates ready.
> > 
> > Let me just reach into my "trivial shell scripts" repository...
> > 
> > ----8<----
> > #!/bin/sh -e
> > 
> > ADMIN=george at gmsys.com
> > 
> > COUNT=$(apt-get -qq -s upgrade | grep ^Inst | wc -l)
> > 
> > if [ "$COUNT" -gt "0" ]; then
> >         echo | mail -s "$(hostname): $COUNT Ubuntu updates available" $ADMIN
> > fi
> > ---->8----
> > 
> > Shell script.  It's a lovely thing.
> > 
> > - Matt
> > 
> 
> This is, in fact, exactly what I do but like I said, a nice way of
> building this into the GUI would be helpful.  Configure->Monitor
> server/machine->enter hostname, done.

Thar be dragons down that path.  Big ones, with smelly breath and sharp
pointy teeth.  You have to have a pre-established trust relationship between
the "monitoring host" (the GUI-enabled machine) and the servers before you
do that -- otherwise you've got a public service saying "here's a list of
security holes on me" to anyone who can manage to ask.

> Yes of course it's not as simple as that but to the sysadmin it should be
> easy.

Installing a simple cron script is hard?

> This also means one must have mail configured on the server.

Which is probably going to be used for $BUNCHA other things anyway, and is
unlikely to be harder to configure than a secure trust relationship.

If you want a GUI to watch all of your machines, use Nagios and an NRPE
instance to get a wide-scale update monitoring thing going.  That has the
added bonus of also giving you, for nearly nothing, monitoring of the rest
of the vital statistics of your hosts.

But please, for $DEITY's sake, don't bloat what is a simple and
straightforward applet with all of the detritus necessary to support network
monitoring.  Just use the tools designed for the job.

- Matt