Administration (+apt-get dist-upgrade) of 100s of machines

["Peter Valdemar Morch" <put9qfe02@sneakemail.com>]

Hi there,

We have 100s of almost identical machines that need to be kept up-to-date with apt-get dist-upgrade .

Having to run apt-get dist-upgrade manually on all of them is just not working (taking too much man-power) due to having to answer the same Y/N debconf(?) questions over and over again especially about config files.

Is there a smarter way? How does one manage many, many debian installations without having to give each one special manual treatment? Ideally I'd like this to be a fully automated operation and only be 
notified of any failures in a reliable way.

Rather than trying to write our own scripts, I've searched the admin::configuring and use::configuring tags and come up with dpsyco, ugrade-system and fai, but they all seem inappropriate to our needs.

We can't possibly be the first to need this...

As a related question, the main interface to these boxes is through apache2 (and http). Is there an apt-get frontend that runs under apache2 and that can handle debconf questions? (And what happens to that if apache2 itself needs upgrading?)

Hope you guys have some pointers/experience to share...

Sincerely,

Peter