apt-get update a good idea in a crontab?
 

Since i manually do an 'apt-get update' every day, I was thinking of having that done automatically via a crontab that updates every 6 hours or so.

Is that a good idea to use a crontab for this? Or should i just keep manually doing it just in case something goes wrong with the crontab?

Update, yes, upgrade, no. You really need to check the packages going to be upgraded. Even though apt-get is very reliable, sometimes it can screw things up pretty bad. I'm all for apt-get update running on the cron, not apt-get upgrade ;)

Check out
cron-apt http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/cron-apt
apticron http://packages.debian.org/stable/admin/apticron

For me, I think it would be a waste of time. I would probably prefer to do the update right before trying upgrade anyway, especially if nothing shows up. I guess I could be more patient. 6 hours should be plenty. I could have it do the cron job right before I wake up for work.