Well, I seemed to have lucked out with my first Apple purchase. One of the first e-mails I looked at this morning:
To Our Valued Apple Customer:
Apple is pleased to announce a new generation of iBooks with faster
processor speeds. We invite you to visit the Apple Store
at http://www.apple.com/store for details.
Your 600Mhz iBook has been upgraded to a 700Mhz iBook at no additional
charge. If you would like to review the changes made to your order,
visit http://www.apple.com/orderstatus.
If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at the number below.
Thank you for choosing Apple!
Yup, that's right. My bad luck, I just ordered an iBook last week. This is a *very* cool move by Apple... they simply canceled my old order (for the low end model) and swapped in a new order (for the low end model). I'm saving $200 + tax on this, and getting a faster model.
Quick note for those who recommend gobs of RAM... that's done and done. Same day I ordered the iBook, I placed an order with Coast To Coast Memory for an addition 512 MB. $95 after tax and shipping, and it's already here.
That's the downside... I wanted the laptop this week. At least they had a good excuse for not getting it to me.:)
I prefer Debian's -- apt-get update ; apt-get upgrade is pretty hard to beat. If you run the stable branch, you can pretty much put that in a cron job and forget it.
Be careful about saying something like this. Too many people will take it literally.
One should never run a software upgrade unattended like this (trimmed and taylored by an IT department is one thing, somebody's local server or desktop is quite another). I know, I know, you take proper precautions with what gets puts in a crontab. Even for something like this, you're probably better off with the snippet:
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade --download
That way:
The upgrade only runs on a successful update
The packages get cached for easy install later, but nothing remotely volatile is going to be executed right now
A nice reassuring note will appear in an e-mail box everyday. (Everybody does alias root mail to a local user, and then check it, right? ^_^ )
Personally, I go a little more crazy. I tend to do:
(The shorthand is mostly for e-mail subject lines, so I get a reminder of what's going on.) In long terms, that's:
apt-get --quiet --quiet update && \
apt-get --download-only --quiet --quiet upgrade && \
apt-get --simulate --quiet --quiet upgrade
This way, I only get mail if something (like an install) needs to get done. I check my e-mail in the morning, and if something is pending, it gets taken care of.
This post is mostly a just-in-case post... someone might read the parent and think, "hey, that's a great idea!" (which they should ^_^). Hopefully they'll scroll a little bit before adjusting their crontab.
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Well, I seemed to have lucked out with my first Apple purchase. One of the first e-mails I looked at this morning:
Yup, that's right. My bad luck, I just ordered an iBook last week. This is a *very* cool move by Apple... they simply canceled my old order (for the low end model) and swapped in a new order (for the low end model). I'm saving $200 + tax on this, and getting a faster model.
Quick note for those who recommend gobs of RAM... that's done and done. Same day I ordered the iBook, I placed an order with Coast To Coast Memory for an addition 512 MB. $95 after tax and shipping, and it's already here.
That's the downside... I wanted the laptop this week. At least they had a good excuse for not getting it to me. :)
Be careful about saying something like this. Too many people will take it literally.
One should never run a software upgrade unattended like this (trimmed and taylored by an IT department is one thing, somebody's local server or desktop is quite another). I know, I know, you take proper precautions with what gets puts in a crontab. Even for something like this, you're probably better off with the snippet:
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade --download
That way:
Personally, I go a little more crazy. I tend to do:
apt-get -qq update && apt-get -dqq upgrade && apt-get -sqq upgrade
(The shorthand is mostly for e-mail subject lines, so I get a reminder of what's going on.) In long terms, that's:
apt-get --quiet --quiet update && \
apt-get --download-only --quiet --quiet upgrade && \
apt-get --simulate --quiet --quiet upgrade
This way, I only get mail if something (like an install) needs to get done. I check my e-mail in the morning, and if something is pending, it gets taken care of.
This post is mostly a just-in-case post... someone might read the parent and think, "hey, that's a great idea!" (which they should ^_^). Hopefully they'll scroll a little bit before adjusting their crontab.