.\" /usr/share/man/man8/dphys-admin.8(.gz)
.\" author Neil Franklin, last modification 2004.04.22
.\" copyright ETH Zuerich Physics Deparement, use under either BSD or GPL license

.TH DPHYS-ADMIN 8 "2004.04.22" "D-Phys Administration Tools"

.SH NAME

dphys-admin \- administer an Debian systems installed package set

.SH SYNOPSIS

.B dphys-admin
[\fIinit\fP|\fIcron\fP|\fInone\fP]

.SH DESCRIPTION

Part of the D-Phys automatic system maintenance.
.PP
dphys-admin installs new packages, updates existing ones, or removes obsolete
ones, selection and install order of which is controlled by package lists,
both site global and host specific ones.

.SH OPTIONS

One parameter can be either \fIinit\fP or \fIcron\fP or \fInone\fP or be
missing (defaults to \fInone\fP), and tells dphys-admin what situation we are
running in, and how to adapt its behaviour towards it.
.PP
\fIinit\fP tells dphys-admin to immediately reboot, if the postinst script of
any package it has just installed or updated has generated an
\fB/root/NEED-REBOOT\fP file.
.PP
\fIcron\fP disallows reboots and instead just sends an mail to the sysadmin to
shedule reboot. This allows automatic updates without disturbing working users.
\fIcron\fP also tells dphys-admin to randomly delay execution by up to 1 hour,
to spread load on packages server, when 100s of machines are updating.
.PP
If the parameter is missing or \fInone\fP then \fIcron\fP style behaviour will
be executed, but without the delay. This is intended for manual or test runs.

.SH PACKAGE LISTS

The package list to be used for checking waht packages need to be installed or
removed is concatenated to one list, by merging three parts/files:
.PP
One site global main list: \fImain.pkglist\fP
.PP
Two host specific addition lists:
hostconfig/\fB`hostname`\fP/\fIhost.pre.pkglist\fP and
hostconfig/\fB`hostname`\fP/\fIhost.post.pkglist\fP, which are added before and
after the main list
.PP
These 3 of these are fetched via wget, adding their names to an user-defined
base URL (file: or http: or whatever else wget understands).
.PP
Format of the resulting list file consists of single lines of following types:
.RS
.PP
\fB#\fP blah blah: comment, don't do anything, same for empty line
.PP
\fB?\fP blah blah: write this text out to user (mnemonic: what are we doing?)
.PP
\fB|\fP cmd param param: execute this command by an shell (mnemonic: pipe)
.PP
\fB-\fP pack1 pack2: delete this set of packages (mnemonic: subtract)
.PP
\fB*\fP pack1 pack2: delete this set of packages, running apt-get with --purge
(mnemonic: splat, squash it)
.PP
\fB+\fP pack1 pack2: install this set of packages (mnemonic: add)
.PP
\fB!\fP pack1 pack2: install this set of packages, even if already installed,
allows early upgrade (mnemonic: force)
.PP
\fB<\fP \fIinput\fP pack1 pack2: install packages with  yes \fIinput\fP
(mnemonic: stdin)
.PP
pack1 pack2: install packages, old syntax for \fB+\fP, deprecated
.RE

.SH CONFIG

\fI/etc/default/dphys-admin\fP (Debian style) or \fI/etc/dphys-admin\fP (normal
style) allows the user to set up the working environment for dphys-admin. This
is a perl script fragment, as executed by \fIrequire;\fP. All perl syntax
rules apply. This file can contain the following settings:
.PP
\fI$conf_baseurl\fP: set where wget fetches the package lists from, this is
most likely required, as it contains your config servers name
.PP
\fI$conf_mailaddress\fP: set where to mail error/warning/log/info messages to,
this defaults to root@localhost

.SH FILES

.TP 5
\fI$conf_baseurl\fP/\fImain.pkglist\fP
site global main package list
.TP 5
\fI$conf_baseurl\fP/hostconfig/\fB`hostname`\fP/\fIhost.pre.pkglist\fP
host specific addition list, add before site global
.TP 5
\fI$conf_baseurl\fP/hostconfig/\fB`hostname`\fP/\fIhost.post.pkglist\fP
host specific addition list, add after site global
.TP 5
\fI/etc/default/dphys-admin\fP
Debian style user config
.TP 5
\fI/etc/dphys-admin\fP
normal style user config

.SH AUTHOR

franklin@phys.ethz.ch, http://www.phys.ethz.ch/~franklin/