Staying Current without Going Insane

If you use SuSE Linux, you've got an even easier-to-use tool at your disposal for automated updates: YaST2, with its on-line update module (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Running On-Line Update from YaST2

Unlike Red Hat's up2date, you don't need to register with SuSE to run this, nor do you need to use or edit a separate file to configure it. The on-line update is self-contained, and in the first couple of screens of an on-line update session you can change its configuration if needed (e.g., you can select a download site that's geographically closer to you than SuSE's US-based ftp.suse.com server).

In order to know when to run the on-line update, you should subscribe to SuSE's suse-security-announce mailing list. Like the Redhat-Watch-list, this is a low-volume e-mail list, so don't worry about SuSE spamming you with frivolous notes. To subscribe see www.suse.com/en/support/mailinglists/index.html.

Honestly, there isn't much else I need to tell you about YaST2/on-line update, except for one minor problem I've had with it (an end-user error, actually, but an easy one to make). If you invoke the command yast2 manually from an xterm or a “Run command” dialog and your X session isn't being run as root, the on-line update will fail, returning a misleading error about being unable to locate the update list on the specified FTP server.

This isn't the case; actually, YaST2 needs to run as root in order to write this file after obtaining it from the FTP site. That doesn't mean you must run YaST2 only from a root X session; it means that if you don't, you should use the menu item automatically created by SuSE for YaST2, in which case you'll be prompted for the root password and the on-line update will work properly.

In my enthusiasm for up2date and YaST2, I haven't yet mentioned one other simple method for updating RPM files: the rpm command itself, which works equally well on Red Hat (and its derivatives) and SuSE. The easiest way to illustrate this method is with an example.

Suppose you receive notification of a vulnerability and available update for the fictitious SuSE or Red Hat package blorpflap, and you use the URL provided in the notice to download the updated RPM to the local path /usr/pkg/updates/blorpflap-3.2-3.rpm. First, you should verify its validity:

rpm --checksig /usr/pkg/updates/blorpflap-3.2-3.rpm

Naturally, for this to work, your distribution's signing key will need to be on your GnuPG public keyring. See my two-part series on GnuPG in the September and October 2001 issues of Linux Journal for a tutorial on using GnuPG.

If the GPG signature checks out okay (or if you assume that it does, which you're free to do at your own risk—the above step is optional), install the update:

rpm -Uvh /usr/pkg/updates/blorpflap-3.2-3.rpm

-U is short, of course, for update (actually update or install), and it works for both updates to previously installed packages and for new packages; -v makes the action verbose, which I like; and -h tells rpm to print out a little progress bar.

How Often Should I Upgrade the Entire Distribution?

The last tool we cover this month is Debian's apt-get. As seems to be characteristic of Debian, apt-get is less flashy but in some ways even easier to use than other distributions' fancy GUI-driven equivalents. In a nutshell, there are only two steps to updating all the deb packages on your Debian system: 1) update your package list and 2) download and install the new packages. Both steps are performed by apt-get, invoked twice:

bash-# apt-get update
bash-# apt-get -u upgrade

The second command tells apt-get to use wget to download updated packages and then to install them.

To receive e-mail notification of Debian security vulnerabilities and updates, subscribe to debian-security-announce by filling out the on-line form at www.debian.org/MailingLists/subscribe. Run apt-get whenever you receive notice of a vulnerability applicable to your system.

By the way, as much as I love apt-get, there is one important feature missing: GPG signature validation. This is because unfortunately, the deb package format doesn't support signatures and because Debian packages aren't presently distributed with external signatures. Reportedly, a future version of the deb format will support GPG signatures.

That's it for this month. Good luck keeping current and staying sane!