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

[Douglas Allan Tutty <dtutty@porchlight.ca>]

On Thu, Apr 19, 2007 at 03:55:06PM +0200, Peter Valdemar M?rch wrote:
 
> Ok, but what is the alternative? I find that without dist-upgrade, I end 
> up with a constantly growing number of packages in the
> "The following packages have been kept back"
> category.
> 

My 2 C worth.  Preface: I've never had to keep 100 machines up-to-date,
but I also don't have the problems that you seem to have re packages
kept back.

I use aptitude (this is not a troll, please), and I use it interactivly.
I have only those pacakges that I specifically _want_ installed marked
as manual with everything else being automatic.  I don't have recommends
automatically installed.  Finally, unless the hardware won't run it, I
run _stable_.  With stable, you should only get security updates which
should not cause package breakage.  This is the whole point of stable.

So what happens if you run stable, run aptitude interactively to get
everything set up properly, then run update, then select the
upgradeable and security upgrades, then tell it to go ahead?

Or, if all the boxes are identical, what about something like system
imager?  Get one updated, create the new image, and propogate it to all
the systems?

Doug.