A while back I wrote about yumnotifier, and how I was using it to get notified when new packages were available for my CentOS installations. Dan posted a comment asking me why I wasn’t using the yum-updatesd e-mail notification support. I recently (CentOS 5.2) started using the yum updates daemon to get notifications, but didn’t update the previous post with this information. Configuring the daemon to generate e-mail notifications when new updates are available is as easy as adding the email_to and email_from settings to the /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf configuration file:
email_to = matty@prefetch.net
email_from = root@server1.prefetch.net
Since I use kickstart to build my hosts, I have a postinstall action that adds these items to the configuration file and adjusts the email_from with the name of the server. Thanks Dan for the comment, and thanks to the CentOS community for adding this super awesome daemon!