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linux-patch

Staged dnf patch management across a RHEL 9 fleet. SSH in, collect pending updates, tag security advisories, and apply them with live re-validation and opt-in serialized reboots. Output is a formatted Excel report plus a machine readable patch plan.

Fourth tool in a family with linux-audit, linux-harden, and linux-diskspace. It shares their transport (ssh_exec.py) and Excel safety layer (xlsx_safe.py).

What it does

  • Enumerates pending updates per host from dnf check-update.
  • Tags which updates carry a security advisory, with severity, from dnf updateinfo list security.
  • Detects reboot-required state with needs-restarting -r.
  • Applies the plan with per-host confirmation, re-validating each host against live state first.
  • Optionally reboots each host after apply, one at a time, waiting for it to return before touching the next.
  • Can undo a single host's transaction with dnf history undo.

It never installs blindly. The discover plan is a candidate list; apply re-runs check-update and installs only the intersection of the plan and what is still pending.

Requirements

  • Python 3.9+ and openpyxl on the machine you run it from.
  • sshpass on that machine if you use password SSH login.
  • RHEL 9 (or any dnf/yum host) as targets. needs-restarting comes from dnf-utils/yum-utils; without it, reboot state reports as unknown.
pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

Discover, writing patch_plan.json and patch_report.xlsx:

python3 linux_patch.py discover -H hosts.txt -u local.user \
    --ask-ssh-pass --sudo-pass-same-as-ssh

Review the report, then apply, confirming per host:

python3 linux_patch.py apply --plan patch_plan.json -u local.user \
    --ask-ssh-pass --sudo-pass-same-as-ssh

Security updates only, with a serialized reboot after each host:

python3 linux_patch.py apply --plan patch_plan.json --security --reboot \
    -H hosts.txt -u local.user --ask-ssh-pass --sudo-pass-same-as-ssh

Undo a host's most recent patch transaction:

python3 linux_patch.py rollback --host web01.hostname.loc --txn 48 \
    -u local.user --ask-ssh-pass --sudo-pass-same-as-ssh

Re-render an existing plan to Excel without touching the fleet:

python3 linux_patch.py report --plan patch_plan.json -o report.xlsx

Authentication

Password SSH plus password sudo, sharing one domain account, is the common case:

python3 linux_patch.py discover -H hosts.txt -u local.user \
    --ask-ssh-pass --sudo-pass-same-as-ssh

Non-interactive, password from the environment:

SSH_PW='...' python3 linux_patch.py discover -H hosts.txt -u local.user \
    --ssh-pass-env SSH_PW --sudo-pass-same-as-ssh

Key-based auth with passwordless sudo:

python3 linux_patch.py discover -H hosts.txt -u local.user -i ~/.ssh/id_ed25519

Passwords travel via stdin or the SSHPASS env var, never on the command line.

Reboots

Reboot is report-only by default. The report and plan flag every host whose kernel or core libraries need a restart, and you decide what to do.

--reboot opts in. Reboots are serialized: apply installs on a host, schedules its reboot, then waits (up to --reboot-timeout, default 600s) for the host to answer SSH again before moving to the next. If a host does not come back, the reboot loop stops and the remaining hosts are left untouched, so a bad kernel never takes the whole fleet down at once.

Output

patch_report.xlsx sheets:

  • Summary: one row per host, update and security counts, reboot flag.
  • Pending Updates: every update, with repo, whether it is a security fix, and severity.
  • Security Advisories: the security subset, by advisory id.
  • Reboot Required: hosts whose kernel or libraries need a restart.
  • Errors: hosts that could not be reached, with the ssh reason.
  • About: tool version, build stamp, totals.

patch_plan.json is the same data as structured input for apply. apply writes patch_results.json recording what was installed and the transaction id per host, which you feed to rollback.

Security considerations

Run artifacts describe your fleet and what it is missing. patch_plan.json, patch_results.json, and the xlsx are gitignored for that reason. Do not commit them.

The remote scripts run under sudo. Package names from the plan are shell-quoted before they reach the install command, and untrusted strings written to the report are neutralised so a hostile package name cannot become a spreadsheet formula.

Development

pip install -r requirements.txt pytest
pytest -q

The parsers and plan logic are pure functions tested against captured dnf output fixtures. The SSH transport is the same module the other tools use.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.