Re: Managing hundreds of debian servers

[Craig Sanders <cas@taz.net.au>]

On Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 11:15:29AM -0800, grover mitchell wrote:
> Greetings list,
> 
> I am curious what other sysadmins use to manage hundreds of debian
> servers, more specifically,  how do you control the
> upgrade/installation of packages. I am familiar with cfengine, but we
> currently use debian packages to deploy all our current conf files.
> Some considerations would be;

i haven't needed to do this for a while, but i always used ssh, scp,
shell and perl scripts to script upgrades to multiple servers.

i'd do the first one or two by hand so that i learned of any quirks in
the upgrade process, then write a shell script to upgrade them all...and
optionally write a perl script to make any changes to config files if
they were needed.

i'd run it overnight and view the log in the morning.

my scripts generally used "touch $hostname" to create a semaphore file
as each host was completed, so that if the script terminated early for
any reason, i could just re-run it and know that it would skip any
servers which had already been upgraded.


craig

-- 
craig sanders <cas@taz.net.au>           (part time cyborg)