tingle is a server side tool for applying packaged software updates. It works by wrapping a thin shell program around your operating system's native package manager. Pesky differences between package management implementations are abstracted away to simplify patch procedure.
Human operators can interact with tingle at the shell, or delegate their work to automated processes that can do the same. In either case, the actor need not bother with commands that are specific to any particular operating system.
For any recognised operating system, the following command will update all installed packages and schedule a reboot to purge old shared objects from use:
tingle reboot
tingle was designed to take aggressive charge over an environment scaling many hundreds of heterogeneous systems, where the risk and cost of a single compromised system exceeded the likelihood and cost of a faulty update (regression).
If precise change management is a staple of your environment, ensure your local package repositories contain only those updates you are prepared to propagate. Alternatively, exercise thorough use of your native package manager's pinning capabilities. tingle will gobble down whatever you leave in the open.
Site or host-specific maintenance procedures can be condensed into tingle hook scripts and automatically executed at precise points in the patch process. For instance, a site's configuration management system could distribute a tingle hook to have a host temporarily check itself out of the site's availability monitoring system before rebooting.
- CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (Tikanga)
- CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 (Santiago)
- CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 (Maipo)
- Debian 5 (Lenny)
- Debian 6 (Squeeze)
- Debian 7 (Wheezy)
- yum-downloadonly (required only on CentOS and RHEL 5)
- yum-plugin-downloadonly (required only on CentOS and RHEL 6)
You might also like:
- yum-tsflags (recommended on CentOS and RHEL 5)
- yum-plugin-tsflags (recommended on CentOS and RHEL 6)
With the tsflags yum plugin installed, tingle can test that all package dependencies resolve before it comes time to install them.
- UNIX manuals are generated using Ronn