Re: Managing disperse servers

[Thomas Goirand <thomas@goirand.fr>]

Keith Edmunds wrote:
> I'd be interested in hearing what others do to manage a number of
> geographically-disperse servers. We currently use Nagios/Munin for
> monitoring, which we're happy with, but system management is more
> challenging.
> 
> How do others approach the problem of security updates? Up until now,
> we've done this manually with some help from 'cssh' for some servers;
> however, that solution doesn't scale as the number of servers increases.
> We're reluctant to have servers automatically install updates. We're
> looking at CfEngine and Puppet, but I'd be interested in hearing of other
> approaches.
> 
> 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.
> 
> Thanks,
> Keith

Hi,

what we do is that we have a set of ssh keys, and we write scripts that
run the commands using ssh. This way, we have the output, and we can
watch it on the console. It's a lot faster to just sit behind the
console and read what happens, and this way we can see eventual errors
(like failed to download a package, etc.).

Thomas