Re: Who's working on centralized management?
On Sat, 17 Apr 1999, Jesus M. Gonzalez wrote:
>
> Hi!
>
> We have a very simple setup for such an environment. In our CS
> lab, we have about 40 machines with the same Debian installation. The
> servers (manually installed) export /usr to all the clients. We use a
> modified installation floppy to preinstall the clients, download /etc,
> /var, and some other things, and /usr is NFS mounted from the
> servers. If anybody find this interesting, I can give
> details. However, I'll be very interested in discussiong your ideas,
> Javier.
I am wondering if it is useful to have one machine dedicated as the master
and the /var/lib/dpkg/status is distributed to the other machines via
rdist. Then an apt-get is run on each of the machines at some time after
the rdist.
The problem with this is the preinst and postinst scripts that might be
interactive. I WISH there was a method to set an environment variable ...
say AUTOGET or something, and the scripts could behave in some known
fashion without asking for input if it is set. It might be set to two
different things ... maybe REPLACE, KEEP, or YES. If it is KEEP, scripts
would keep existing configurations, REPLACE would cause configurations to
be replaced with the package config, YES would simply mean that the user
will defer to the package author's judgement on what should be done. If
the variable is not set or is set to NO, it will retain the existing
interactive behavior.
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