Re: Managing disperse servers

["Wojciech Ziniewicz" <wojciech.ziniewicz@gmail.com>]

2008/6/13 Keith Edmunds <kae@midnighthax.com>:

> I'm also interested in hearing of other techniques for managing multiple,
> mostly-similar (but not identical) systems. We're currently managing about
> 40 such servers, so not a huge number, but we're expecting that number to
> grow and we want to put some tools and techniques in place before we drown
> in trying to manually manage them.

Maybe I'm wrong but your question should be "managing many servers"
because probably in your case geographic dispersion has no influence
on management from the point of view of management system.

For managing a farm of debian servers i wrote something like mysql
console. Maybe it's not pleasant but it works very well for me.
Every node (server) connects to my masterserver with question like
"are there any commands that i should run ? " every X minutes. There
exists a list of servers with the table format like " id,group,
servername, serverip, command_to_run, locked_state  .. etc ".
When i schedule some updates/commands/etc within my mysql database ,
every server does it's own job. It works mainly like windows GPO but
with many advantages.
Of course there are issues like securing mysql traffic etc.

I think you should try this.

regards.


-- 
Wojciech Ziniewicz
Unix SEX :{look;gawk;find;sed;talk;grep;touch;finger;find;fl
ex;unzip;head;tail; mount;workbone;fsck;yes;gasp;fsck;more;yes;yes;eje
ct;umount;makeclean; zip;split;done;exit:xargs!!;)}