Day: March 27, 2004

I watched the X-43a test flight on NASA TV.  Everything seemed to go well.  The X-43a was launched with a booster rocket from a B-52.  The X-43a then seperated from the rocket, and a few seconds later they gave it fuel, and it seems to have functioned properly.  After about 10 seconds, they cut fuel, and it’s currently coasting around Mach 5.

Whew.  I was worried that keeping a SuSE system up to date without employing their awesome YaST graphical administration was going to be hard.  After finding the right keywords to google, it looks like that’s not going to be a problem.  Enter your SuSEian friend, online-update. According to this page about Yast Online Update, online-update is a cronable command line program that allows you to keep your system patched and up to date.  My guess is that keeping up to date will look something like this:

online-update -u ftp://mirror.mcs.anl.gov/pub/suse/ security recommended

I might set up a little script to run once a day with -s and email me with a list of patches if the output changes.

I’m really stoked, as I need to replace a Red Hat 7.3 server running a bit of software that only runs on certain platforms (plesk).  My choices are RH9 (not viable long term), RHEL3 ($$$), Fedora Core 1 (Core 2 will be out soon, this is a quickly moving distro, not the greatest for server stuff), Mandrake 9.2 (more of a desktop distro), and SuSE 9 (a desktop distro, but runs great on my lappy).  I’d love to be running Debian on this particular box, but that’s unfortunately not an option.  I’ve already shelled out the bucks for Plesk and I’ve already got some stuff running on the existing installation.  This is the second of two major upgrades that I’ve recieved at no extra cost, so I can’t complain.

I’m installing SuSE 9 on a testbed now to see if I can get this stuff to play nice with it.  We’ll see how it goes.

Update:

It looks like online-update isn’t installed by default on SuSE 9, so I’ll have to check that out.  Running you from the command line gives me a nice curses-based system for downloading updates though.  It feels very similar to the graphical version.  Cool!