[clug] monitoring number of updates available on debian/ubuntu

[Tony Breeds]

On Tue, Jul 20, 2010 at 02:58:49PM +1000, jeff wrote:
>  I'm looking for a means to tell how many packages, if any, are
> available to be installed on a debian based system. I've done some
> searching but haven't come across anything so it's either not easy
> to find or I'm not looking in the right places. This is for use in a
> monitoring system so that it can warn someone that they need to
> check the available updates and install as needed. To put it another
> way I'm looking for the debian equivalent of "yum check-update". A
> full blown script would be much appreciated if you happen to have
> such a beast lying around :-).

Well You can look at  update-notifier-common specifically,
/usr/lib/update-notifier/update-motd-updates-available

When I ssh into machines with that configured I see somethign like:
--
498 packages can be updated.
0 updates are security updates.
--

Failing that I think:
	apticron - Simple tool to mail about pending package updates
	cron-apt - automatic update of packages using apt-get
Are packages that can automatically do an apt-get update and then send an email
basied on what's available.


Yours Tony