puppet-aptdater

This module will install apt-dater, an ncurses-frontend to apt on multiple hosts, backed by SSH.

Setup

To set things up, you'll have to create a private/public key pair for SSH access to the nodes managed by apt-dater. It's wise to also create a dedicated user on each host and (at least somewhat) limit what the user can do with sudo by restricting usable commands to apt-get and aptitude (for dependency mgmt).

What puppet-aptdater affects

• one host holds a SSH private key to log in to all configured clients
• all clients hold the public corresponding SSH pubkey
• client hosts have users with limited sudo access to apt-get for running updates and regular access to everything else
• on the central node, there's an ncurses frontend to view and manage available updates on each host.

How to set up a central and several client nodes

• Assign the aptdater class to each node
• set the $ishost attribute to true for one of them

Additional requirements:

• Create a private key, install it to /etc/apt-dater/ssh/id_rsa and distribute the corresponding public key to the apt-dater user on each client node.

node central.example.com {

  class { 'apt-dater':
    ishost => true,
  }

  file { 'apt-dater-private-key':
    ensure => 'present',
    path   => '/etc/apt-dater/ssh/id_rsa',
    owner  => 'apt-dater',
    group  => 'apt-dater',
    mode   => '0600',
    content => file('aptdater/obviouslyyouneedtocreateaprivatekeyyourself')
  }
}

node client1.example.com {

  include ::apt-dater

  ssh_authorized_key { "apt-dater-${::facts['fqdn']}":
    ensure => 'present',
    user   => 'apt-dater',
    type   => 'ssh-rsa',
    key    => file('aptdater/alsoheregoesthepublickeypath'),
    target => ['from="central.example.com"]
  }
}

Usage

Having installed apt-dater on all hosts, just run the frontend apt-dater on your central node and manage updates from there.

Reference

There's only one class:

Class aptdater

• ishost (Boolean): Install this host as a management node
• username (String) Default: apt-dater: The username that should hold sudo rights on the client nodes. If you change this, make sure to change apt-dater's app config, too.
• homedir (String) Default: /home/apt-dater: Used only for holding the pubkey

Limitations

• This module currently just installs pretty vanilla settings for apt-dater, if you want a lot of customization, feel free to add it.

Links

• Github project
• Github issues