firstboot system maintenance task

Florin Andrei florin at andrei.myip.org
Fri Mar 24 19:00:21 UTC 2006


After installing Fedora on any system, when the system boots up for the
first time I always log in as root immediately, in a text-mode console
(not via X), then run this sequence:

killall anacron
yum -y update
yum clean packages
anacron -nd
sync
reboot

I just type everything in then I walk away and let the system do it
since there should be no user interaction. Perhaps a better idea would
be to run everything inside a typescript session, just to catch all the
output for further analysis - hmmm, that actually does sound good, I
should add that to my first boot ritual from now on. :-)

Anyway, even before Fedora, I was pretty much doing the same thing, but
translated in Red Hat Linux terms.
Even before that, 10 years ago when I was using Slackware Linux :-) I
was doing things that were functionally equivalent, albeit a lot more
manual and hugely more cumbersome.

I just think it's a good idea and it's the best and shortest way to
build a clean and up to date system out of a fresh install.

So I was thinking - perhaps it, or something equivalent - could be added
as the last step to firstboot. Perhaps as a popup, informing the user
that the system will apply all available updates, perform some
maintenance tasks then reboot, and asking the user to either accept or
reject it.

The only snag that I can think of is Internet access - firstboot should
test HTTP access and perhaps ask the user to configure proxy settings
first (and skip this whole thing if there seems to be no way to enable
Internet access at this point).
Also, perhaps anacron should not even be started the very first time the
system comes up after install, but instead wait for this maintenance
task to be either accepted by the user (then the system will reboot and
anacron will launch normally next time) or rejected (then perhaps
anacron should be launched by firstboot).

This might also help a lot of newbies since I noticed that some people
running Linux for the first time are not aware of the necessity to apply
updates and patches and do not even know how to do it.
For the advanced users it would be just a convenient way to bring a
fresh install up to date before actually pounding on it with real
workload.

Thoughts?

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/




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