How can I manage apt efficiently on multiple machines?

I manage around 30 Ubuntu servers using puppet. I've seen many references to cron-apt and apticron as approaches to keeping their packages up to date but I haven't been able to find a way to centrally manage the process. With cront-apt/apticron I would still need to log in to each host and run aptitude update to perform the update. Not to mention review notifications from all 30 machines whenever a core package is updated.

There has to be a better way. Any suggestions?

Solution 1:

Landscape might be of interest to you. This is the "official" management tool for managing large Ubuntu deployments, and Canonical is probably very keen to get your dollars for its use.

RE-EDIT:

First, a disclaimer; I haven't used mirroring for Debian or Ubuntu, so I am not familiar with the software.

Second, it appears that apt-mirror would be "too heavy" a solution, my apologies. The original idea was that you would have a separate test machine (or test environment, probably a virtual machine?) to deploy the update on. Once you are satisfied with the performance of the update, you would pull/put the package into your "deploy" mirror (there would be the local mirror from the official sources, and a secondary mirror for just updates that you wish to deploy). The remote machines would then run an update at a pre-set time and pull it from your "deploy" mirror onto each machine, a cron job consisting of:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade --quiet --assume-yes

Unfortunately, as I began to read through the details, it seems that apt-mirror will pull all kinds of stuff and not just the packages you are after. So, I'm going to abandon this idea, although the concept has some merit.

Solution 2:

A co-worker discovered and has looked briefly into apt-dater, which is a "terminal-based remote package update manager".

You use a curses-based interface to manage updates on all of your hosts, or groups of hosts, etc. Supports logging of the full apt session, including any errors that may be encountered, etc.

Relies on ssh and sudo on the managed machines.

see https://github.com/DE-IBH/apt-dater

Haven't used it myself, so I can't endorse it, but it sounds close to what you're looking for.

Solution 3:

Since you're already using Puppet, the easiest way to do this (and the best for change control/tracking purposes) is to specify the desired version of packages you want installed in the puppet manifest. You keep an eye on the security announcements list, and when something you use comes through you just update Puppet to say "install this new version of this package". Assuming you're using revision control on your manifests, you then know when the "policy" was changed, and the reports from Puppet show you exactly when the change was actually made (so you can correlate that easily against any later log events).