patch2mail - now in Zypp SVN

Mein erster Commit ins Zypp SVN: patch2mail. Ich nutze diese Gelegenheit gleich mal, um das Ganze bekanntzumachen ;-)

Server-Administratoren kennen das Problem: Es gibt kein gutes und einfaches Werkzeug, um per Mail benachrichtigt zu werden, sobald es neue Updates gibt. Mein patch2mail füllt diese Lücke und verschickt die gewünschte Mail.

Da Admins eh englisch können müssen, ist der Rest dieses Eintrags auf englisch ;-)

My first commit to the Zypp SVN: patch2mail. I'll use this opportunity to announce this little tool ;-)

Server admins know the problem: There's no good and simple tool available to get an email notification when new security updates are available.

patch2mail is a simple tool that fills this gap and mails you whenever new updates are available.

In theory, you could use

zypper lu | mail -s updates root

but this will also send a mail if no update is available.

I was annoyed by that and therefore wrote this little tool, consisting of a shell script and a XSLT file to transform the zypper XML output to text.

Usage is easy: Download the RPM from the buildservice (http://software.opensuse.org/search?q=patch2mail, it's in home:cboltz) and install it on your server. Make sure you receive mails for root (for example setup mail forwarding in /etc/aliases). That's it. The script directly installs to /etc/cron.daily and will inform you when new updates are available.

patch2mail is available for openSUSE 10.2 and 10.3. (might work on 11.0 alpha also, but I didn't test it yet)

Subject: <servername> updates

=== foobar-libs - Patch 1234-0 (security) ===

foobar-libs: fixed security issue when doing foo.

This patch contains the fix for a security problem when
doing foo. [... long patch description continues ...]