Re: managing a parc of 30 debian station
On Sat, Feb 05, 2005 at 03:29:28PM +0100, BRINER Cedric wrote:
> 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.
I would suggest to take a look at cfengine or (better yet) a backport of
cfengine2. It enables you to use a declarative language to specify the
desired configuration of your target systems. Cfengine regularly runs
on every host, checks for differences from the intended configuration
and applies any changes necessary to put the host into the desired
state. Every aspect of the configuration can also be shared between a
group (class) of hosts defined by the administrator.
Configuration files can be kept in a central repository and distributed
automatically, so you can avoid building custom packages, at least for
the purpose of distributing your custom configuration files.
If the configuration differs only slightly between hosts, cfengine
can do text substitutions to produce the individual config files
automatically from a template.
See http://www.cfengine.org/cfdetails.html for more features.
I know of at least two locations where cfengine is being used
successfully. One is a is a secondary school, where the computers are
maintained by volunteering university students, the other is a
university computing service with several hundred machines.
It certainly is scalable.
To keep the installed set of software packages identical between
machines, you can use pkgsync, for example.
At the risk of stating the obvious: a DHCP server is very useful,
especially for the initial installation, but also afterwards, should the
network structure change. If you don't have one yet, I would recommend
to set one up, otherwise ask the operator of the existing server to have
your machines added.
For the initial installation, the preliminary sarge installation
manual lists many possibilities:
http://d-i.alioth.debian.org/manual/en.i386/ch04s07.html
If I am not mistaken, the new Debian installer for sarge is also able to
install the current stable (woody).
You also might want to evaluate the sarge distribution, which is
supposed to be released "soon", although I would expect it to still take
a while. In its current state, it would cause a considerable workload
for an admin to keep up with security issues and test updated packages.
On the other hand, getting woody to work on current hardware can also be
a challenge.
I hope this helps,
Mirko
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