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Is there a way to have an Oracle Linux System (Version 7) check for, download and install any available packages automatically?

I usually run Ubuntu systems where this is kinda trivial to setup, but couldn't find anything comparable for Oracle Linux.

Any hints? Thanks in advance!

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Since Oracle Linux 7 is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) I suppose it use yum as package manager. Then you could give a look at yum-cron package,

yum-cron is an alternate interface to yum that is optimised to be convenient to call from cron. It provides methods to keep repository metadata up to date, and to check for, download, and apply updates.

check if it is present in your repositories:

yum list yum-cron

However, if it is a production server, I suggest to first evaluate the pros and cons of automatically updates. You can read this post to start.

Note that with yum-cron it is also possible to just automatically download the updates (no istallation), and in case send a notification email to the sysadmin, and let him/you evaluate if it is the case to install them or not.

OP solution (reporting here the comment) : the package yum-cron was available after enabling ol7_optional_latest repository.

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  • Thanks for the suggestion, but it looks like yum-cron is not part of Oracle Linux. I'll see what else I can find. – etchesou Nov 27 '15 at 9:43
  • you welcome, sure, this is an important decision feel free (aka you must) to evaluate all the possible solutions. Anyway in your OS should be possible to add repositories, or install rpm packages – lese Nov 27 '15 at 9:53
  • weird thing is, there are example cron jobs for yum-cron included in the Oracle yum rpm, but not the actual yum-cron command. – etchesou Nov 27 '15 at 9:55
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    had to enable the ol7_optional_latest repository to get yum-cron, which seems to do fine. thanks again! – etchesou Nov 27 '15 at 10:05

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