Quick tip - Apticron - Handy hints and tips

Apticron is a great tool, it will automatically e-mail you an alert if you have outstanding packages that need upgrading on a *nix systems. Some useful tips to customise it are shown below.

These variables can be set in /etc/apticron/apticron.conf - The file is well commented. Here are a couple of quick more advanced examples.

Custom e-mail address:

CUSTOM_FROM="Server Updates <server@example.com>"

Custom System Name:

SYSTEM = "example.com"

To test apticron rather than waiting for the cron job to run the following from the terminal:

/usr/sbin/apticron