Updating Headless Servers

[John Dangler]

On Tue, 2007-04-03 at 11:47 -0400, Kent Borg wrote:
> I am wondering how to best keep headless servers up to date with
> security fixes, etc.
> 
> On my notebook I get notified when there is an update available.  Is
> there a handy way to have a headless server e-mail me when updates are
> available?
> 
> I know I could set up a cron job to do something like this, but I am
> guessing there is probably already a feature like this that I simply
> need to configure and turn on.  Is there?
I don't know of one off the top, but setting up a cron job to run
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade would be ok in theory, except in the
case where you get kernel file updates, which would require a reboot...
You could pipe output from the above to an email as well, although you'd
have to test whether or not a "restart required" message would appear as
part of that output...

Possibly update/upgrade logs might be the place to find that out.

Have you tried looking up the info on update-notifier (there are no man
or info pages for this in edgy)?  either on ubuntu or google... 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> -kb
>