In a previous blog entry I touched on the process I use to generate weekly patch reports for my Solaris servers. I support several Fedora Core servers as well, and use the following cron job to generate weekly update reports similar to the ones I receive from my Solaris hosts:
0 0 * * * /usr/sbin/check4updates | /usr/bin/mail -s "Patch list" matty`
The check4updates script will compare the currently installed packages with those available in the configured yum repositories, and print the available updates to stdout. I pipe the output from check4updates to the mail command, which in turn causes an email similar to the following to show up in my inbox:
From: Super-User
To: matty
Subject: Patch list for pooh
Date: Sat, 15 Apr 2006 11:14:23 -0500T(EST):00-04:00
Updates available for pooh
===
=== yum reports available updates:
===
ffmpeg.i386 0.4.9-14_cvs20060301.r atrpms
gnupg.i386 1.4.3-0_32.rhfc5.at atrpms
libgcrypt.i386 1.2.2-11.rhfc5.at atrpms
libgpg-error.i386 1.3-0_8.rhfc5.at atrpms
libquicktime.i386 0.9.8-15.rhfc5.at atrpms
lirc.i386 0.8.1-cvs20060325_57.r atrpms
mpeg2dec.i386 0.4.0b-1.rhfc5.at atrpms
pm-utils.i386 0.15-1.4cubbi_suspend2 atrpms
sgml-common.noarch 0.6.3-17_11.at atrpms
spamassassin.i386 3.1.1-1_29.rhfc5.at atrpms
xml-common.noarch 0.6.3-17_11.at atrpms
xvidcore.i386 1.1.0-8.rhfc5.at atrpms
I digs me some Fedora core!