Hello all,

I installed YUM and as a service. This service runs nightly and YUM checks the distro. The question is, how to know what params this Yum command is using. I downloaded Yum from the duke edu's website.

Also, where the logs are located, if any. I did a 'rpm -ql yum' to find the filelisting, but could not find any log files anywhere.

Thanks.

With most things, you can check the configuration file to see where things are placed. Do

ls -l /etc/yum.conf

which is the most likely place for your yum.conf file (should be the default). Mine has this up near the top (among other things):

cachedir=/var/cache/yum
logfile=/var/log/yum.log

Yours is *probably* the same..... check it first.

I use a little different approach, as I don't like running an update without reviewing it first to see if I really want or need it. I have this in my user crontab:

0 6 * * * /usr/bin/yum list updates > /home/myusername/Desktop/yum-updates

Yum will run, check and see what updates are available, and results will be written to that file. I just review it each morning. You can do something like that with up2date also, just do

up2date -l

in place of the yum command, and either adjust the file name it writes to, or have it append to the file instead of overwriting it.

I like this better as it lets me check on the updates before installing them.

Taking this a step further, you could write a brief script in Perl to do the same commands, and then send a daily e-mail report. Add to that some checks on diskspace, error and security checks and so forth, and you have a customized report for your machine. :-)

Thank you, that's a lot of help.

I figured out that the cron.daily under /etc has the cron file and also figured out the command it's running.

I am also planning on doing something similar you suggested.

Don't edit the cronfile directly! :-)

If you're familiar with editing the crontab, please accept my apologies for "lecturing".

However, if you do need to edit your user crontab and you aren't familiar with it, I'd suggest this tutorial (http://weather.ou.edu/~billston/crontab/). There are plenty of others- this was the second one I found when I Googled "crontab tutorial" (I didn't like the first as much).

Anyway, read that tutorial and see if it makes sense.

Also, "Linux Administration: A Beginner's Guide" by Steve Shah (ISBN# 0072225629) is an *excellent* book that you will find very useful. It covers topics in a way that helps you understand what is going on, but is thourogh enough to serve experienced Linux administrators, too. I keep it on my desk.