apt-dater provides an ncurses frontend for managing package updates on a large number of remote hosts using SSH. It supports Debian-based managed hosts as well as rug (e.g. openSUSE) and yum (e.g. CentOS) based systems.

Features:

    keep dozens up to hundrets of (GNU/Linux) hosts up to date
    generic apt-dater-host protocol to manage different package managers
    filter hosts by Tcl expressions
    multi instance capable
    spawn ssh-agent on startup (optional)
    run multiple connections in parallel using screen
    no root login required, use sudo to call package manager (optional)
    record any screen activities during install/upgrade/connect for traceability(optional)
    export host informations to XML for automatic processing
    upgrade hosts part of clusters one after another
    host informations collected:
        LSB informations (distri, codename, version)
        installed, upgradable, broken, extra and hold back packages
        identify physical/virtual machines
        kernel version and check if the most recent kernel is running