Re: Managing disperse servers
John Keimel wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 13, 2008 at 7:40 AM, Wojciech Ziniewicz
> <wojciech.ziniewicz@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>
> I'd disagree.
>
> Geographic location makes a difference to me. I certainly will apply a
> patch or a new untested package to the server that's in the physical
> data center that I can touch before I apply it to a server that's in
> Philadelphia or Atlanta, where I have no remote hands, no personnel
> and if the patch pooches the machine, have only one thing to resort to
> - a previous image of the machine. At least now I have previous images
> of machines to go back to, which is nice.
>
>
Maybe you need a networked KVM, like this one:
http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=528
It should lower that risk a lot.
> But that's me, how I have my servers and my acceptance of that level
> of risk. I am rather risk averse in my remote servers.
>
> But I do agree with many of the assessments that mixing manual and
> automatic updates is tricky and riskier. It's so easy to miss
> something on one machine. I've chosen to update manually, but have
> scripts that run 'apt-get update' and 'apt-get -s dist-upgrade' and
> send me the output if there are updates to be had. That's my automated
> kick in the pants.
>
> $.02
>
> HTH
>
> j
>
>
>
--
Hector Gonzalez
cacho@genac.org
http://www.genac.org
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