cron-apt

[blu at vl.com (Tom Metro)]

I started out with the simple objective of setting up some automated 
process that would send me an email when updates were available for my 
Debian system. Searching the net turned up several simple scripts 
wrapped around apt-get and ran from cron, but the official answer seemed 
to be the cron-apt.

So I installed cron-apt, and configured it to use aptitude. By default 
it spews out emails daily. I adjusted it to send output only on changes, 
and that still produced daily emails. Then I told it to send emails only 
if updates are seen, and that seems to work, but produces the email 
shown below, which has 2 lines of relevant information and 70 lines of 
noise.

Has anyone fine tuned cron-apt to produce nice simple reports of what is 
available for upgrading on a Debian system? Or should I scrap it and use 
one of the simple scripts?

  -Tom

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: CRON-APT completed on lex [/etc/cron-apt/config]

CRON-APT RUN [/etc/cron-apt/config]: Sat Sep  3 04:00:01 EDT 2005
CRON-APT SLEEP: 2174, Sat Sep  3 04:36:15 EDT 2005
CRON-APT ACTION: 3-download
CRON-APT LINE: dist-upgrade -d -y -o APT::Get::Show-Upgraded=true

Reading Package Lists... 0%

Reading Package Lists... 100%

Reading Package Lists... Done

Building Dependency Tree... 0%

Building Dependency Tree... 0%

Building Dependency Tree... 50%

Building Dependency Tree... 50%

Building Dependency Tree

Reading extended state information... 0%

Reading extended state information... 0%

Reading extended state information

Initializing package states... 0%

Initializing package states... 75%

Initializing package states... Done

Reading task descriptions... 0%

Reading task descriptions... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
   libpcre3 procps
2 packages upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 306kB of archives. After unpacking 45.1kB will be freed.

Writing extended state information... 0%

Writing extended state information... 61%

Writing extended state information... Done


0% [Working]

Get:1 http://security.debian.org sarge/updates/main libpcre3 
4.5-1.2sarge1 [108kB]


0% [1 libpcre3 1051/108kB 0%] [Waiting for headers]

Get:2 http://www.backports.org stable/all procps 
1:3.2.3-0.backports.org.1 [198kB]


1% [1 libpcre3 2439/108kB 2%] [2 procps 1051/198kB 0%]

14% [1 libpcre3 24647/108kB 22%] [2 procps 19095/198kB 9%]

26% [1 libpcre3 49631/108kB 46%] [2 procps 32975/198kB 16%]
41% [1 libpcre3 88495/108kB 82%] [2 procps 38527/198kB 19%]

55% [2 procps 63511/198kB 32%]
66% [2 procps 94684/198kB 47%]

82% [2 procps 143264/198kB 72%]
98% [2 procps 193232/198kB 97%]

100% [Working]

Fetched 306kB in 3s (83.5kB/s)




-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/e/fps/3452158/