I have a little tip that I thought others who run servers might find handy. Obviously, security is a major concern with servers, and part of that involves staying up to date with the latest patches. The problem is, the person maintaining the server has to know that there are updates available. Servers are often headless and accessed remotely, so you don't tend to see automatic update notifications like you would on a desktop, and a lot of ISPs block people from running their own mail servers so tools like cron-apt don't work.

I've come up with a method that uses Twitter for automated notifications of available updates (with a list of updates available). Twitter provides an RSS feed which you can then subscribe to (or get email notifications using another service that monitors the feed). It's pretty handy, and you can read about how to set it up on my blog. The shell script is written for Debian-based systems, but can probably be modified to work with other distributions pretty easily.

I hope this helps someone.