Private message from Jens-U

[Jens-U]

Hi shevary, (if this is your actual first name, sorry for not capitalizing)

[QUOTE=shevary]Hi Jens,

I do not know if you remember I poses a questin about the Automate patching process.
It was good and thank you for all your input, I want automate the Linux patching for SLES and OpenSuse, I just want get more information.[/QUOTE]

of course I remember

[QUOTE=shevary]You mentioned “ We’re not the most sophisticated users when it comes to SMT, just distributing patches as they come. That works flawlessly and gives us both the support (information) we need and the independence from Internet-based servers. Our SMT machine is the installation source for openSuSE installs, too (but not via SMT)”
So do you use SMT or not?
I want be able to patch both SLES and Open SUSE?[/QUOTE]
We’re using SMT, but just in its basic functionality. SMT is capable of handling a multi-stage distribution, but I have no practical experience with that.
I don’t know if SMT might be able to handle openSUSE hosts - we’re not using it that way (see below).

@shevary

Can you explain this from the post” Hm, at least we are not using SMT for this - although we have our openSUSE repositories shadowed to the same server machine SMT is running on. The repository list on the openSUSE machines is set up to use the local repositories via NFS or FTP (depending on the network connection) and updates are applied using standard openSUSE mechanisms.”

Hm, I don’t know what to say more - we have a server that has SMT installed and fetches the SLES updates periodically (and of course SLES hosts are registered to use that server, instead of contacting SUSE’s servers directly). On that same server, we’re shadowing the openSUSE repositories and have set up the openSUSE clients to use those, instead of using the openSUSE repositories. Taht way, the standard update calls from the openSUSE calls will go to our server, instead of using the external one.
These two mechanisms act totally independent, we especially do not see the openSUSE clients status when running “smt-clients”.

@shevary

Can you explain this from the post Are you talking about setting up a SMT server in the DMZ to shadow the offical patches to your DMZ, and feeding those to you machines manually? That will work, all you need to do is to disable the cron job for the SMT client and invoke “zypper” on demand on the client machine. In case of a client view behind your question: SMT won’t download the patches to the (SMT client) machine, it rather invokes “zypper” to pull the patches and updates the resulting status at the SMT server. So if you’re looking at the client side of things, then no: SMT won’t download, you’d rather have to invoke “zypper” manually, which then will download from your SMT server.

To me, your question was ambiguous, I saw two possible scenarios you might have been after.

If you want to get patches to the server per manual invocation, you can do so by running “zypper up” on the client at any time. In order to avoid automatic patching, you’ll have to disable the cron jobs created when installing the SMT client.

But this is still depending on the repository server (i.e. the SMT server) being accessible when running “zypper up”… it’s not like the SMT client will download all updates to the client machine and then you could decide when to install what.

If these comments weren’t helpful to you, please try to ask again, as I am not sure I perfectly grasped what your questions are aiming at. In addition, I think the forum would be a good place to continue the (technical) discussion, so others can learn both from the questions and the responses. You have my explicit permission to copy the above part when creating a new thread or adding a new post to the original thread… but if you want to keep it private for whatever reason, that’s ok with me, too.

Regards,
Jens