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

[Allan Jude]

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.

-- 
Allan Jude

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