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

Explications intéressantes sur le format de stockage des clefs SSH générées par OpenSSL et sur le moyen d'améliorer l'algo de chiffrement utilisé pour chiffrer les clefs privées.