Re: [LUG] School Server

[Paul Hirst <paul.hirst@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, 2009-04-28 at 11:53 +0100, Benjamin M. A'Lee wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 28, 2009 at 09:47:09AM +0100, Richard Brown wrote:
> > So can we respond to this please? Firstly is it possible to create a
> > server that updates itself?
>
> Of course. I can’t imagine why anybody wouldn’t do this. At the very
> least, a cron job should do it.

On some ubuntu server boxes that I want to keep up to date but I'm not
too paranoid about I have the following. It keeps them up to date daily
and also reboots if required. I want them up to date more than I care
about the very occasional few minutes of unexpected downtime.

I bet there are many situations where people don't mind if the server
disappears for a few minutes at some early hour of the morning once a
month or so.

/etc/cron.daily/autoupdate
----------------
#!/bin/sh
apt-get -y update
if [ -e /var/run/reboot-required ]; then
        rm /var/run/reboot-required
fi
apt-get -y dist-upgrade
if [ -e /var/run/reboot-required ]; then
        rm -f /var/run/reboot-required
        shutdown -r 1
fi
---------------

/usr/share/update-notifier/notify-reboot-required
---------------
#!/bin/sh
touch /var/run/reboot-required
---------------

The second script has to be made executable.

IIRC ubuntu-desktop has it's own notify-reboot-required script which is
how the notify popup works after you've installed a new kernel. It's
that which inspired the above. I'd be interested to hear of a better
solution in anyone has one.


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