Hi,
The recent thread has reminded me of something.. I have two VPSes
running Debian and each one checks for package updates once an hour,
emailing me if there are any non-security ones available (security ones
are installed automatically).
Both use apt-catcher:
first:# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/
lenny main contrib non-free
deb-src
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny
main contrib non-free
deb
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/security.debian.org/
lenny/updates main contrib non-free
deb
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/www.backports.org/debian
lenny-backports main contrib non-free
second:# cat /etc/apt/sources.list
deb
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/
lenny main contrib
deb-src
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/ lenny
main contrib
deb
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/security.debian.org/
lenny/updates main contrib
deb
http://apt-cacher.lon.bitfolk.com/debian/www.backports.org/debian
lenny-backports main contrib non-free
.. so first looks at the non-free bits of the main Debian archives and
second doesn't, but apart from that, they're the same.
The oddity is that the second VPS usually picks up updates more than an
hour before the first one.
One example was on 14th January this year, when there was an update to
mysql-server-5.0 from 5.0.51a-24+lenny4 to 5.0.51a-24+lenny5. The second
VPS noticed this at 9.37am, but the first one only started emailing me
at 11.37am. Both continued happily emailing me once per hour until I did
the update, so the script is indeed running once per hour on both..
.. so any ideas why the second one's seeing changes in the same set of
files earlier than the first one? It's never been the other way around.
Ian