Webmin for patch reporting and remediation

Submitted by sespit on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 21:29

Hello,

One of many features I like, no LOVE, about Webmin is that it helps automate our patch management process. As nerdy as it sounds, I actually look forward to getting emails every Sunday morning with a report of the patches that were applied at midnight.

To that end, I have been tasked with finding a solution to cross-platform Linux (Ubuntu & Redhat) patch management reporting and remediation solution and this feature might be close to what we need. Believe it or not there is a dearth of Linux products that not only report the state of patches on a system, but then can also remediate those patches. Is there any way, through something like Ansible, to set this feature up on multiple servers when installing Webmin Pro? So something like

webmin --enable --patchreporting --email=r-nix@northwestern.edu --schedue=SimpleWeekly

Something like that?

Thanks!

  • Ryan
Status: 
Active

Comments

Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 11/07/2016 - 23:21

By "patches", do you mean just regular package updates distributed via YUM and APT, or something else?

Because the Software Package Updates module has a feature already for sending email about available updates, and can even automatically apply them.

Submitted by sespit on Tue, 11/08/2016 - 06:48

That is correct, any updates. So I'm hoping there is a way for us to 1) Automate the install of Webmin Pro and 2) through the command line, set up the Software Package Updates module.

Is this possible?

Submitted by JamieCameron on Tue, 11/08/2016 - 11:51

So you can install and enable Webmin using a command like rpm -U webmin-1.820-1.noarch.rpm

There isn't any automated way to setup notifications about new packages though..

Submitted by sespit on Tue, 11/08/2016 - 13:11

Ok, thanks. Is there a file where these settings reside? Because Ansible could easily deploy the file(s) too.