Topic: Automated Security Updates??

[RedBeard]

Hi All,

Want to say thanks to all the contributors to this great project.  I recently installed SME, for a small school after the budget for the network upgrade turned out to be less than expected.  The “IT Staff” consist of me and 2 other another volunteers.  The school has approximately 60 computers and two servers that will, hopefully, be hooked up to the network shortly.  Since we didn’t go with the MS server solution, I am currently administering the servers, I have some limited experience and am learning a lot.

My question right now is how are security updates handled?  Since the “IT staff” is not on-site regularly and is a volunteer group it is important that maintenance be as automated as possible.  From my research it looks like these updates are not handled automatically at this point.  

If this is the case, what is the best way to keep abreast of security updates that are needed?  How are people handling this?

Thanks,
Kevin
More questions to follow . . . 8^)

[nigeltodd]

Updates for which platform? I am not sure about SME updates automaticaly being instigated, but do a search on here for Windows updates - there is a packagae which will save Windows updates and allow clients to retrieve them!

[RedBeard]

I was talking about SME updates specifically for sercurity related issues.  Since I am new to this system I was wondering about finding out about security related updates in general for the SME specific portions of the software as well as the Linux portion of the server software.

My concern is that six months from now with the server purring along without the need for much attention (Hope so) that I don't miss an update related to  sercurity, which cause my system to cracked.

I thought that I read that some distros had updates that ran via a cron job.  So that security issues would be patched automatically or semi-automatically.

Thanks for the reply,
Kevin

[byte]

you might wish to read

http://forums.contribs.org/index.php?topic=23050.0

there are ways you can do automated but at this time there is no set location everyone seems to be doing there own updates on there own  

HTH