Centralized updates of debian-live systems
Hello,
I'm planning the installation of a number of systems that will start
from 3 but soon will grow to ~30, possibly ~100.
I'm planning to use debian-live because:
* I need a single installation for many different systems, and a live
system is the most suitable for this job
* I'm used with debian, I know how it works
* it's very customizable, and I need to integrate the systems in the
existing network (LDAP autentication, printers, shares, etc.) and to
arrange the environment the same way users are used to
In order to maintain these systems in a centralized manner, I'm
thinking about a way to automagically propagate modifications and
updates done in a single system.
One possible implementation could use rsync, but this would force me
to have a dual boot, so that rsync could update the main system while
it's not running. Furthermore, rsync needs to be set as server on the
updated machine, so I'd be forced to do updates only on a single one.
Then I recalled in mind that years ago Knoppix was able to save all
user modifications to a zip file and reapply them at the next boot,
using the capabilities of unionfs.
Now, I'm wondering about something like this:
* set up a read-only live system on the hard disk of the machines
* allow admins to modify system files and install packages through a
unionfs-like mechanism
* set up a script that collects all modifications and applies them
during shutdown, once stopped all services and remounted rw the
filesystem, and saves a copy of them in a zip file
* at the next boot, the system is updated and can transfer the zip
file with the updates in a place where the other systems can find it,
maybe nfs or samba share
Any comments, ideas, suggestions or other about this is much appreciated
Cheers,
Davide
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