Ben Gertzfield wrote: > I've been approached by a few admins here at UC Santa Cruz who are > looking at not only making Debian Linux the official supported flavor > of Linux, but also maintaining a few labs full of Debian boxes. > > However, I can't think of a good way currently to keep a lab full of > boxes in synch with Debian; it's a huge pain to run apt-get on every > machine by hand, and rsync would be way too slow to run on / on every > machine. Why do you have to do it by hand? I can think of several ways to automate this... Cron job on each machine polls a locally maintained deb archive for new packages. rsh on a centrally maintained list of lab machines. The real trouble you will have is when you have to answer questions during the configuration stage. No one wants to answer the same question for each and every machine. I believe there was some discussion about this on this list in the past few weeks. Look at the archives. Although I'm not sure if it was resolved. You can always just re-package any of the debs so that they auto-configure to your specifications, then distribute them locally to the lab-boxes. > Has anyone solved this problem? What's the best way to keep a lab full > of Debian boxes in synch with each other; say an initial dpkg > --get-selections > selections; dpkg --set-selections < selections, but > then if a security update comes out, do I have to run apt-get on every > single machine? You could always just get a really, really big and fast server and a bunch of xterms ;) -- This .sig space available for lease. Please contact: Mitch Blevins | mitch_blevins@mindspring.com
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