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Ximian Testing Red Carpet Daemon
rainmanjag writes "GNOMEdesktop.org noted a new page on Ximian's site announcing the testing release of Red Carpet Daemon which would allow administrators to do automatic software updates on workstations within the enterprise. You can also get a command line copy of Red Carpet." Hopefully this works out better than the time I cronned apt-get upgrade under Debian's unstable tree. Whoops.
For the last eight months, we have been using autoupdate at our site to keep about 50 RedHat Linux boxes up-to-date. It seems to work pretty well. Though, this red carpet stuff looks pretty interesting too.
Ximian Red Carpet comes as a statically linked binary, so you don't even need gtk for it. All you need is X. I've been using Red Carpet for a while and it makes security and software upgrades a breeze. It totally gets rid of the dependency hell that comes with RPM. I do not use Ximian's Gnome, so I'm only subscribed to the Redhat 7.3 channel.
With rc and rcd, you will be able to do automated updates from the command line. Just what redhat and redhat like distributions needed as answer for apt-get.
Anyway, here's a good reference, from RedHat themselves. I personally haven't done the automated installation, but I've read the manual, and it seems like an easy thing to do. They give you a template file to work with, and you just have to edit it. Pretty straightforward, I guess.
Hopefully this works out better than the time I cronned apt-get upgrade under Debian's unstable tree. Whoops.
... :)
Debian has three trees; stable, testing and unstable.
When using the stable tree, instead of using cron, subscribe to debian-security-announce and only update when a package with a security problem needs updating.
Update scripts also often need to ask you questions and cron doesn't allow that - and testing and unstable sometimes break on update, because they are not, well, as stable - they need to be watched.
Offhand comments like the above make debian seem flakey when it is far easier to maintain and stable than red hat, because debian is built robustly from the ground up.
How hard is it to check mail and apt-get update; apt-get upgrade when needed?
Anyway
RCD gives the administrator full control over their system. It does not require Ximian Desktop to be installed, nor will it auto-update the Desktop. RCD can be used to simply install vendor updates on to servers, if that is what you are interested in.
... bless updates which are placed on to systems?" Of course not, and this is exactly why RCD requires explicit direction to make changes to the system software.
Granted, some operating systems handle updates differently than others, but, using Red Hat Linux 7.3 as an example, this month alone there have 58 packages released as errata. RCD will tell you which of these apply to your system, and can, optionally, install them for you. However it will not ever install something unless a user directly tells it to.
As the original post says "Can you be responsible for a slew of deesktops when you don't
If you don't want beta, just don't subscribe to the beta releases. The other stuff seems fine. This particular system is an RH7.1ish 2.4.19 kernel with Ximian Gnome.