Cruel and Unusual Geography

I know people who manage several, and in a couple of cases hundreds, of servers. While I’m nowhere near that level — I’m a coder, not a system administrator —I do have a few machines that I’m responsible for. The work subversion repository, for example, and the issue tracker, and one or two others, mostly running various flavours of Ubuntu Server on virtual machines.

Manually checking whether patches are required for the kernel or applications

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

becomes more of an effort when there’s more than one or two machines to manage. Enter apticron, a utility which will automatically email you when there are packages needing upgrading.

Configuration is simple; there’s a nice overview here.

Update: there are brief (but accurate) configuration instructions posted now.