on Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 04:45:21PM -0700, Dean Montgomery (agape_logos@hotmail.com) wrote:
> We are currently managing around 50 Terminal Servers, each terminal server
> is running RedHat. The terminal servers have been heavily customized and
> hacked. Each of the 50 Terminal Servers can have anywhere from 30 to 60
> thin clients attached.
>
> We decided to install Debian in a chroot environment on each of these
> servers in order to minimize disruptions. We chose debian because it is
> relatively easy to keep up-to-date.
>
> What will be the easiest way to keep all 50 Debian Chroot environments
> up-to-date?
Are you doing chroot _installs_, or actually running the systems live in
chroot mode? There's a difference.
Chroot is useful for some stuff because it lets you keep multiple
environments around. However, the systems are _not_ autonomous, and
share resources, particularly relating to networking process space, and
the like. It's possible in circumstances to break out of chroot jails.
While I find chroot _installs_ of Debian, as a way of getting the distro
onto a computer, useful, I wouldn't run a production system as a whole
in chroot mode. Specific services (e.g.: bind), sure, but that's a
specialized subcase.
Chroots can also be useful for build environments in which resources,
libraries, directory trees, and the rest, need to be arranged a certain
way. But the system as a whole really isn't used outside of build and
test requirements.
A better solution, if you plan on keeping RH on the systems, would be to
run the Debian installs via UML (user-mode linux), or similar.
> Should we create a base image then copy that image to the remote servers?
A lot of folks "build" new Debian boxes by tarring across an existing
build and tweaking a few files (fstab, hostname, networking).
> Is there a way to set a cron job to auto-update the chroot environments?
apt-get update && aptitude -dy dist-upgrade
...will update and download packages. Still better to manually commit
the updates than to run them automatically.
> Is there a way to have one "aptitude" type interface that will interact
> with all 50 servers simultaniously?
If you've named your hosts appropriately, you can approximate this by
several means. SSH can do some neat stuff:
for host in $( seq 50 ); do ssh server-${host} 'run commands'; done
...for example.
Another option would be to create a set of minimal boot environments, or
use something like the LTSP, where you can centrally manage a single
server, and not deal with the desktops at all.
> In other words what will be the easiest and most efficient way to maintain
> these Debian chroot environments. I wiould like to try to avoid manually
> logging in and running aptitude 50 times at each school inorder to
> install/upgrade packages.
If you schedule things, even desktop-specific updates can be done.
There are tools to assist in this though I'm not personally familiar
with them. FAI is the grand-daddy, not sure of the others.
Peace.
--
Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/
What Part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?
Bush: All we have to sell is fear itself.
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