Re: Administration (+apt-get dist-upgrade) of 100s of machines
On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 10:37:54AM -0000, Peter Valdemar Morch wrote:
> 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...
For about 20 machines, we use cfengine for configuration management and
a Perl rewrite of pkgsync:
http://rtg.informatik.tu-chemnitz.de/~mpa/software/pkgsync
This version of pkgsync is customized for our cfengine setup - if you
consider using it, please read and adapt it first.
We have error notifications sent via email, you could also write them
to logfiles instead.
We point our sources.list to mirrors of debian.org, backports.org,
and an archive of .debs we built ourselves. If you keep local copies of
all repositories, you can check for upgrade problems before rolling out
new packages to large numbers of machines.
best regards,
Mirko
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