Since they share the most of the packages, I just copy the files from one to another. and complete the rest with update & upgrade.
If I would have more, I would have used the apt-proxy package. It will save you much download time.
I seconds what Amos said, apt-get update should not cause any problems.
apt-get upgrade I would do automatically only in woody / sarge not in SID. apt-get dist-upgrade I would never do automatically.
Amos idea about using dpkg's get-selections / set-selections would work only if you have to same config for every computer. If one computer has a different CPU - you might want to install another kernel-image.
If you create something automatically, don't forget to include apt-get clean after upgrades or at least apt-get autoclean. It will prevent from /var to get full.
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Noam Rathaus wrote:
Hi,
Does anyone have some experience with handling a few desktops (Linux based) installed with Debian in regard to updates... How do you manage them? i.e. do you use crontab to make them all do dist-upgrade? etc..
I don't have experience with *multiple* desktops but I do have a cron job which automatically updates the index files and downloads the packages but doesn't install them. I could make it install them as well if I liked:
/usr/bin/apt-get --quiet update; /usr/bin/apt-get --quiet --yes --download-only upgrade
there is also package cron-apt which does the same.
If you trust the automatic updates then this is possibly all you need. If you are concerned about bandwidth then maybe you can make the cache of one of the machines available to the rest to pull from.
But if you want to have more control over what's updated then I think what I'd do is to:
1. have the above apt-get commands to automatically download upgrades. 2. Go through the updates with aptitude(8) and decide their fate. 3. Use dpkg --get-selections | ssh other-machines "dpkg --set-selection"
This way you'll have exactly the same set of selections on all machines, and you control what gets upgraded.
--Amos
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