Re: Managing disperse servers

["John Keimel" <john@keimel.com>]

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.

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