I have another project to add to my list. Hopefully I will finish one of these this semester.
For the sake of argument, I will define the "lifespan" of an operating system to be from the day it is released to the public (either for purchase or for download) to the time *two* new versions of the operating system have come out. An example would be OpenBSD 2.9. It was released on June 1st of 2001. Since OpenBSD 3.1 (the second version past 2.9) came out on May 19th of 2002, the lifespan of OpenBSD 2.9 was 06/01/2001 to 05/19/2002.
Over the lifespan of OpenBSD 2.9, there were 27 different patches. That might not seem like much, but that is over two patches a month. For a company that has many servers, that could be a lot of patching. Likewise, the current version of OpenBSD (3.1) has 14 patches already. That version had only been available for under three months when the last patch was issued.
Now that I have that cleared up, time for the actual project: An OpenBSD version of Windows Update. Since no self-respecting BSD admin would go to a website for their patches, BSDUpdate would be a command-line tool. It would check the current state of your system, verify which patches were needed, and download them. The tool can then install the patches and restart services as/if necessary. The tool could also be put in "automatic mode" and placed into a cron job for completely seamless updating.
This is actually a very easy project (but also time consuming). Nevertheless, I will be damned if I ever finish it.
For the sake of argument, I will define the "lifespan" of an operating system to be from the day it is released to the public (either for purchase or for download) to the time *two* new versions of the operating system have come out. An example would be OpenBSD 2.9. It was released on June 1st of 2001. Since OpenBSD 3.1 (the second version past 2.9) came out on May 19th of 2002, the lifespan of OpenBSD 2.9 was 06/01/2001 to 05/19/2002.
Over the lifespan of OpenBSD 2.9, there were 27 different patches. That might not seem like much, but that is over two patches a month. For a company that has many servers, that could be a lot of patching. Likewise, the current version of OpenBSD (3.1) has 14 patches already. That version had only been available for under three months when the last patch was issued.
Now that I have that cleared up, time for the actual project: An OpenBSD version of Windows Update. Since no self-respecting BSD admin would go to a website for their patches, BSDUpdate would be a command-line tool. It would check the current state of your system, verify which patches were needed, and download them. The tool can then install the patches and restart services as/if necessary. The tool could also be put in "automatic mode" and placed into a cron job for completely seamless updating.
This is actually a very easy project (but also time consuming). Nevertheless, I will be damned if I ever finish it.