Best Practices for auto patching in the Linux Environment

Summary

This article covers the best practices for setting up auto patching in the Linux environment

Environment

Linux Operating system

AWX

Satellite

Procedure

AWX Satellite Inventories

• The best way for automating update schedules for linux machines is creating monthly schedules for an update and reboot cycle in AWX
• These schedules are ran on AWX inventories and targeting different inventory groups
• For linux machines in the satellite host collections are used for creating these update groups that sync with AWX from the satellite
• An example of a host collection from the satellite is
  • Randall_Update_First_Sunday_Early_Morning
• AWX uses that host collection to create a host group in the AWX inventory(lsa-ssti-p-randall) using that host collection when syncing with the satellite
• Creating a scheduled job in AWX for the first Sunday morning of each month to run the linux updates job template(Randall - Run Linux Updates) specifying the lsa-ssti-p-randall inventory and the Randall_Update_First_Sunday_Early_Morning host collection group will only run the linux updates job template on the hosts in that host collection group from that inventory.
• Host collection groups allow multiple linux machines to be updated and rebooted with only running one AWX update job.
• Example update schedule in AWX listed below for satellite inventories
  • Randall - Update/NOREBOOT: First Saturday Morning (Satellite)

AWX Non-Satellite Inventories

• Non satellite inventories need to have their update groups manually created in AWX
• An example non satellite inventory is
  • Randall non Satellite machines USER MANAGED
• An example non satellite update group is 
  • First_Saturday_Evening_APT
• Non Satellite groups won't have RHEL machines or machines with a similar Linux distro
• Linux machines will need to be manually added to these non satellite inventory groups in AWX
• Schedules are created and setup the same way as a satellite inventory.
• Example update schedule in AWX listed below for non satellite inventories
  • Randall - Update/NOREBOOT: First Saturday Morning (Non-Satellite)

Reboot/No Reboot setup

• The default AWX update job will reboot the machine(s) after running the updates
• To not force reboot the machines add the variables listed below to the Variables section in the prompted values section of the Schedule details
  • allow_reboot: false
  • force_reboot: false
     

External resources

LSA Satellite 

AWX