How we sort of automate updating system packages across our Ubuntu machines

Every place with more than a handful of Unix systems has to figure out a system for keeping them up to date, because doing it entirely by hand is too time consuming and error prone. We're no exception, so we've wound up steadily evolving our processes into a decently functional but somewhat complicated setup for doing this to our Ubuntu machines.

The first piece is a cron job that uses apt-show-versions and a state file to detect new updates for a machine and send email listing them off to us. In practice we don't actually read these email messages; instead, we use the presence of them in the morning as a sign that we should go do updates. This cron job is automatically set up on all of our machines by our standard Ubuntu install .

(Things are not quite to the point where Ubuntu has updates every day, and anyway it's useful to have a little reminder to push us to do updates.)

The second piece is that we have a central list of our current Ubuntu systems. To make sure that the list doesn't miss any active machines, our daily update check cron job also looks to see if the system it's running on is in the list; if it's not, it emails us a warning about that (in addition to any email it may send about the system having updates). The warning is important because this central list is used to determine what Ubuntu machines we'll try to apply updates on.

Finally, we have the setup for actually applying the updates on demand, which started out as a relatively simple Python program that automated some ssh commands and then grew much more complicated as we ran into issues and problems. Its basic operation is to ssh off to all of the machines on that central list of them, get a list of the pending updates through apt-get , then let you choose to go ahead with updating some or all of the machines (which is done with another round of ssh sessions that run apt-get ). The output from all of the update sessions is captured and logged to a file, and at the end we get a compact summary of what groups of packages got updated on what groups of machines.

I call our system sort of automated because it's not completely hands off. Human action is required to run the central update program at all and then actively tell it to go ahead with whatever it's detected. If we're not around or if we forget, no updates get applied. However, we don't need to do anything on a per-machine basis, and unless something goes wrong the interaction we need to do with the program takes only a few seconds of time at the start.

(We strongly prefer not applying updates truly automatically; we like to supervise the process and make final decisions, just in case.)

Not all packages are updated through this system, at least routinely. A few need special manual procedures, and a number of core packages that could theoretically be updated automatically are normally 'held' (in dpkg and apt terminology) so they'll be skipped by normal package updates. We don't apply kernel updates until shortly before we're about to reboot the machine, for example, for various reasons.

Our central update driver is unfortunately a complicated program. Apt, dpkg, and the Debian package format don't make it easy to do a good job of automatically applying updates, especially in unusual situations, and so the update driver has grown more and more features and warts to try to deal with all of that. Sadly, this means that creating your own equivalent version isn't a simple or short job (and ours is quite specific to our environment).

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