Re: Central Package Management

[Guido Günther <agx@sigxcpu.org>]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2009 at 10:53:43AM -0500, Jeremy Winder wrote:
> I'm hoping one of you can help me out here. I have a network of 250+
> Debian boxes and I need a way of controlling what packages get installed
> on a machine by machine basis. 
> 
> Normally I would just setup a private repository and set the machines to
> run apt-get update; apt-get upgrade nightly; however, this doesn't give
> me the ability to install a package on one box but not the others. I
> looked into "pinning" but that is controlled on the client side not the
> server side. 
We're using a "home grown" solution that makes the client look up it's
package list in an LDAP tree and then run:

 apt-get install <pkglist>

via a cron job on the retrieved list. The tree itself has this kind of
layout:

dc=com
    cn=example
        cn=clientA
             cn=pkg1
             cn=pkg2

        cn=clientB
             cn=pkg1
             cn=pkg2
             cn=pkg3

        cn=clientC
             cn=pkgX
             cn=pkgY

It's basically the DNS name reversed so it's easy for each client to
figure out where to look at. It's also possible to define a common base
set of packages for all clients (and some of the cn=pkg entries can
carry simple configuration data). Unfortunately I didn't yet get around
to polish this enough to put it into a releasable form.

You might also want to look at FAI maybe in combination with Gosa.
Cheers,
  -- Guido