Is there a canonical way to find out the last time that yum update was run on a system?
Our set up is that we have staging servers that run automatic updates, and provided they don't fall over, we will manually update our production servers about once a month (barring critical updates). (I say manually, ideally I want to manually trigger an update across all of them, but that's another issue).
But you get busy, tasks slip etc. So I want to set up a nagios check that will start bothering us if we've left it too long.
Searching the web hasn't got me very far. Poking around the system, the best thing I've found so far would be something like:
grep Updated /var/log/yum.log | tail -1 | cut -d' ' -f 1-2
which gives me something like Mar 12 which I can then convert into a date. There are a few minor complications about whether the date is this year or last year, and I'd also need to check /var/log/yum.log.1 in case of checking immediately after a logrotate. But that is just scripting details.
This can of course be 'fooled' by an update to a single package rather than a general update.
So is there a more canonical way to see when yum update was run?
Edit: I've now written a Nagios NRPE plugin that uses the idea I put forward in the question. You can grab it from https://github.com/aptivate/check_yum_last_update
Best Answer
The yum history option allows the user to view what has happened in past transactions. To make it more simple you can grep Update from yum history