On Wednesday 21 February 2001 19:56, Peter Münster wrote:
On Wed, 21 Feb 2001, maarten van den Berg wrote:
Back to updates. If one day I can get a server completely up to date with just 1 wget command, and one rpm -F command that'd be perfect. Up until now I have to choose between downloading ALL and let rpm -F sort it all out, or manually (with an ftp/web client) lookup the name of the package and retrieving it with wget.
Why is this all so complicate? I think, that's why there are security announcements. Copy and paste the ftp://... line to your wget should do it. And for other updates, there is a WEB page with the right links. Really, I don't see any problem with updating...
That may be true for servers that are kept perfectly up to date, you notice a new version, paste the URL and that's it. Fine. In reality, -at least my reality- I am confronted very often with a new (or too lax) customer who didn't upgrade his or her box. In that case I need to check the current state of the box and then have all security-patches up to this date applied. You see where the problem lies... Granted, If you only have a couple of boxen to manage and you do it meticulously, there is no problem with the current setup. If you have the -unfortunate- task of securing many boxes after the fact because the owner didn't, it's another story. Also, I tend to keep a (disk-)copy of the full DVD online on an intranet ftp/nfs server for install-purposes. Of course I need that kept up to date, so a fresh install from nfs is automatically up to date. While retrieving updates with wget, I get all symlinks too, thus double traffic. I understand and appreciate it's not a problem for you, but it may be for others, and that definitely includes me. Maarten