Linux Administration Cookbook

How it works...

yum-cron is actually just an easy way to use YUM from within a cron job (which we mentioned disparagingly earlier, while discussing systemd timers). Because of this, you would find it easy to incorporate into a custom timer (see earlier chapters) or a cron job that might run nightly.

In general, you could apply all updates to a development environment nightly, and then potentially stagger updates to other (higher) environments throughout the week, upgrading production to the next Tuesday. That is entirely up to you, as the all-powerful sysadmin.

If you have taken the suggestion of enabling yum-cron as a service, you should now find that the following file exists:

$ ls /var/lock/subsys/yum-cron /var/lock/subsys/yum-cron

This ...