managing a parc of 30 debian station

[BRINER Cedric <work@infomaniak.ch>]

hello,

I'm facing a problem of administrating 30 debian stations at the 
Observatory of Geneva (abbreviation: OBS ), and this number of stations 
could increase significantly. So I really need to find a way of 
administrating them which can easily scale.

_ every station will have the same configuration except: ipconfig, the 
hooks used in ifup,ifdown for iptables, and some hardware differences.

_the list of packages to install on it will grow


let me explain you what I imagine to do:


1. make a reference station
   so I'll install a machine which will be the reference to the other 
one in therm of which package has to be installed on them.

2. create/rebuild some packages to take in account of our OBS specific 
configuration
   I thought about rebuilding some packages to add their specific 
configuration files on it.
   Packages such as xntp, cups,iptables/ifup/ifdown, xscreensavers, 
ssh, exports, locale, sendmail...
   Or also to create some packages which will handle the modification 
of  specific configuration.(xntp,...)

3. create a local OBS repository of the rebuild/created packages
   this will be the local repository of the OBS's packages

4. construct an local repository based on the reference station
   I'll use the:  ``apt-move sync'' command to create a local 
repository (standard debian + OBS's packages) of all the packages needed.
   so before updating this reposiroty we will ensure that the reference 
station works properly with the updated packages from debian and from OBS

5. install the new machines, and only use the (4) to their 
/etc/apt/sources.list

6. add to their crontab a command that will ask them to automatically 
update from the (4) and to check if there is any new packages to install

7. pray that this is a good way to handle that administration.


Advantages of this method.
-rebuild packages is just at the step(2)
     apt-get source packages
     modify the configuration file on it
     rebuild it
 let the script made by the debian maintainer to upgrade this 
pacakages, by stopping the daemon, ....<whatever> , restart the daemon
- the (4) local repository is double checked, and we can verify that all 
the new packages doesn't brake the system
- when installing a new station, just do the minimum to install it and 
then put the crontab script. and it will install itself properly
- it uses the strongness of apt-get and dpkg to maintain the stations

Disadvantages:
- take a big deep in how to manage packages ``a la'' debian style

Question:
-does debian provide some specifique tools to create special conf of 
their packages. something like this:
dpkg-prepareSpecifiqueDebianPackage cupsys
and then it creates you a
./cupsys
 |-- certs [error opening dir]
 |-- classes.conf
 |-- client.conf
 |-- cupsd.conf
 |-- interfaces
 |-- mime.convs
 |-- mime.types
 |-- ppd
 |   |-- canon.ppd
 |   |-- hp0.ppd
 |   |-- hp0_a3.ppd
 |   |-- hp0_a3d.ppd
 |   `-- tek2t.ppd
 |-- ppds.dat
 |-- printers.conf
 `-- pstoraster.convs
you go inside, modify what you want
dpkg-buildpackage
and you push it on your local repository and apt-get handle that 
automatically ?



Cedric BRINER