On Mon, 2003-01-13 at 23:13, Steve Traugott wrote: > - Clusters, web farms, trading floors, call centers, etc. where you > want multiple production machines to be the same. (This is the case > which people usually think of.) > > > However, in such a case, you could simply execute apt-get install > > foo on all such machines with the same results. Hence, a large file > > won't be required. > > > > However, if you need to install .deb files from date-XXX later when > > packages were replaced by more recent or security fixed versions of > > those packages, the above won't work. > > Exactly. Unless you execute 'apt-get install' on all machines at the > same time, identical results are not guaranteed. There needs to be a > way to encapsulate both the action and the data at that instant in > time. I think what I'd do if I were to maintain a cluster: create a local debian repository, with a local 'beta' and 'final' distribution (like testing and stable, but I think it's better not to use those names). The test machine(s) obviously point to beta, the cluster to final. So, every new package would be put into beta, where it could be tested and then it would be propagated into final (totally manual process. Could be semi-automated by syncing beta to (for instance) Debian stable+security on a regular basis). The only remaining problem would then be distributing debconf data. I'm not familiar enough with that to have a proposal here, but I'm sure you can come up with something. A cron job on all production machines would then look like: - sync debconf db with master - apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade (Hmmm. this does only cover installed pkgs. So a way to make sure new packages are installed is required, too. But, since I would only expect to-be-installed packages in the local 'final' repository, this is easy. grep the Packages file and install everything available). cheers -- vbi -- this email is protected by a digital signature: http://fortytwo.ch/gpg
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