Re: Devops question: freebsd-update needs a real tty to run, problem for automation

On Tue, Jan 13, 2015 at 4:14 PM, Allan Jude <allanjude_at_freebsd.org> wrote:

> On 2015-01-13 18:11, Craig Rodrigues wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Ahmed Kamal, a devops expert, is helping me to script the steps to
> > upgrade a cluster of FreeBSD machines.  For certain machines,
> > we want to track the official FreeBSD releases and use freebsd-update
> > to install official updates.
> >
> > We found that when the invocation of freebsd-update was scripted
> > and not run via a real tty, we can into this error:
> >
> > "freebsd-update fetch should not be run non-interactively."
> >
> > There are various workarounds mentioned on various web pages.
> > However, should we modify freebsd-update so that it can work better
> > when not run via a real tty?  This would make it more devops/automation
> > friendly.
> >
> > The closest thing I have found is "freebsd-update cron", which can fetch
> > the updates and run without a real tty.  The only problem with
> > "freebsd-update cron"
> > is that it sleeps a random amount of time between 1 and 3600 seconds
> before
> > fetching the updates.  This is OK when run in a cron job,
> > but not OK when run as part of a devops automation framework.
> >
> > Anybody have ideas as to the best way to proceed in fixing this in
> > freebsd-update?
> > --
> > Craig
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>
> I think this requirement was originally added when Colin hosted the
> mirrors for FreeBSD update himself, and was worried about everyone
> scripting it to run via crontab at midnight every night.
>
> It is likely a false requirement, and can be safely removed.
>
> Dealing with the merges, only really affects version upgrades, and is
> less of an issue compared to being able to automate security fixes.
>


Hi,

I submitted this review: https://reviews.freebsd.org/D1665
to remove the check for an interactive tty in "freebsd-update fetch".

Being able to run "freebsd-update fetch" via automation will make it much
more
convenient to update clusters of FreeBSD nodes.

--
Craig