Operating System: FEDORA CORE 5

Hi Joe,

I am a little confused with the conflicting information here.

1. It says here at http://www.virtualmin.com/support/documentation/virtualmin-admin-guide/ch03.html
that I need to run "yum update" at command line to upgrade Virtualmin Pro.

2. It says here at http://www.virtualmin.com/faq/one-faq?faq_id=1511#3358 that "On systems that support it, Virtualmin configures the package manager to always keep the system up to date automatically, so the administrator never needs to manually install updates."


So my questions are:

A. Does Virtualmin Pro automatically download and install updates & upgrades? Or do we need to run "yum update".

B. If Virtualmin Pro automatically downloads and installs updates & upgrades, what time does the process starts (everyday?)?

C. Regardless of the methods above, does the Virtualmin update process also automatically upgrade the system to the latest version of webmin and usermin? Thus, there is no need to use Webmin's "Upgrade Webmin" option and Usermin's "Upgrade Usermin" option?

D. What about PHP, MySQL and Apache etc.? Does Virtualmin updates/upgrades also include the latest compatible versions? Or do we have to manually upgrade them as time passes?

E. Will updating all Fedora Core software to the latest version via "su -c 'yum update'" ( http://fedora.redhat.com/docs/yum/en/sn-updating-your-system.html ) affect Virtualmin Pro, Webmin or Usermin?


Thanks mate!

Howdy A,

The second statement above is incorrect--a couple of users complained loudly very early on about the installer turning on automatic updates. We no longer touch that aspect of things. If automatic yum updates were on before installation of Virtualmin, they'll still be turned on after. Likewise for if they were disabled.

You can enable automatic updates by starting the yum service (it is my belief that this is a good idea):

service yum start

And enabling it on boot:

chkconfig --level 345 yum on

I'll update the FAQ to represent this new reality.

As stated in the FAQ, when possible, we use the OS-standard package management system. On Fedora, the standard is yum, so a single "yum update" performed either manually or via the automated update process will update your whole system including Virtualmin packages. Updates for CentOS also work this way, but not Red Hat--because Red Hat uses up2date and up2date's support for yum repos is broken (it doesn't support password protected repos), one has to perform both a yum update and an up2date to get all available updates for Virtualmin and the OS. Mandriva and SuSE use the same software installation sources as the OS standard (though SUSE has three different, and moderately broken, update mechanisms and so far I've only been able to get one of them working, so our SUSE update support is abit clunky along the same lines as Red Hat).

The goal is for updates to be as seamless as possible, and for them to feel like a standard part of the OS, as much as possible. On Fedora, seamlessness has been achieved to a large degree. A system update with yum will also update all of the Virtualmin components and dependencies can be met between and across repositories.

Thanks very much for clarifying, Joe.

"a single "yum update" performed either manually or via the automated update process will update your whole system including Virtualmin packages."

That sounds perfect!

Cheers!