1:yum-updatesd-0.9-2.el5.noarch On our servers, I've set run_interval = 86400 (24 hours) in /etc/yum/yum-updatesd.conf, and put a script in /etc/cron.daily that first waits a random amount of time (between 0 seconds and 10 minutes), and then uses dbus-send to queue a check: $ /bin/dbus-send --system --type=method_call --dest=edu.duke.linux.yum /Updatesd edu.duke.linux.yum.CheckNow The goal is to cluster all of the yum-updatesd notices at around the same time, instead of having them occur randomly throughout the day and night (depending on when the server was last rebooted and thus yum-updatesd was last started). Surprisingly, queueing a check via dbus does *not* reset yum-updatesd's notion of how long it needs to wait for the next run interval. For example, if I reboot a server at 18:00, when yum is started, it immediately goes to sleep for the run_interval value. Sometime between 04:02 and 04:12 the next day, the cron.daily job requests a check via dbus, which yum dutifully obeys. However, at 18:00 that same day, yum-updatesd will initiate yet another check, because the interval between yum's start time and the current time has exceeded the run_interval, even though the interval between the last check and the current time has NOT exceeded the run_interval. For now, I'm working around this behavior by having the cron.daily job perform a condrestart on yum-updatesd before it requests a re-check via dbus. But I think yum-updatesd's behavior here is highly non-intuitive: queueing a check via dbus should cause yum-updatesd to reset the run_interval timer.
yum-updatesd isn't designed to be used that way to do what you want. What you probably want is to _not_ run the yum-updatesd service, but to just call "/usr/sbin/yum-updatesd --oneshot" from your cron script. And/or install yum-cron from epel. The whole point of the run_interval code is to try and make the yum-updatesd's run at different times. For instance if 90%+ of people log onto their machines between 8:55 and 9:05, triggering a check update in some way, we don't want all of their yum-updatesd's to syncronize within that 10 minute window.
Ah; --oneshot wasn't mentioned in the (stub) man page for yum-updatesd. Yes, that's definitely want I want here. Suggestion: consider documenting --oneshot in the yum-updatesd(8) man page...