There are quite a lot of posts on how to do this, but my differs a tiny little bit, so I’m saving it for my own future reference, and also for the benefits of the wider audience.

I am updating a multisite Drupal 6 installation. To the best of my knowledge, the only difference for Drupal 7 is that instead of the site_offline D6 variable the maintenance_mode variable is used in D7.

On Debian stable and later, you can sudo aptitude install drush and then just use it immediately after that.

Note: I recommend su webuser (or sudo -s followed by sudo -s -u webuser) before you run any non-testing drush commands, where webuser is the user which owns your web-exposed files (e.g. Debian’s default is, I think, www-data). I’ve seen a lot of recommendations to run drush as a super-user, but that does not make sense, and may actually cause problems with file ownership.

One last thing before we start: if your drush seems to work fine but hangs when untarring modules – check this solution.

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Drush is awesome, especially for updating multisite Drupal installations.
I had only started using it a few days ago, and I’ve immediately hit a problem, to which I did find a workaround.

Symptoms

• running drush @sites pm-update results in normal execution up to after answering ‘y[es]‘; then drush seems to hang indefinitely (haven’t waited beyond about 10 minutes, maybe it does produce an error after a long while);
• running the same command with --debug shows that drush hangs when trying to untar the downloaded module.tar.gz archive; there are no errors/warnings, it just hangs with no CPU usage;
• trying to untar any of the modules downloaded from drupal.org manually is also unsuccessful: tar -xzvf module.tar.gz seems to do nothing, it also hangs with zero CPU usage/time and no warnings/errors;
• interestingly, if I create some test.tar.gz locally, tar does happily extract that;
• finally, running strace tar -xzvf module.tar.gz shows a number of unexpected lines, such as references to NSS and libnss files (I am only showing some of the lines of strace output, including the last line):
  

  open(“/etc/nsswitch.conf”, O_RDONLY) = 4
  read(4, “# /etc/nsswitch.conf\n#\n# Example”…, 4096) = 683
  open(“/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_nis.so.2″, O_RDONLY) = 4
  open(“/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_files.so.2″, O_RDONLY) = 4
  open(“/etc/passwd”, O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4
  open(“/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnss_mysql.so.2″, O_RDONLY) = 4
  open(“/etc/group”, O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = 4
  open(“/etc/libnss-mysql.cfg”, O_RDONLY) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
  open(“/etc/libnss-mysql-root.cfg”, O_RDONLY) = -1 EACCES (Permission denied)
  futex(0x7fd0816e8c48, FUTEX_WAIT_PRIVATE, 2, NULL

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