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Re: Automatic deployment and maintenance



We are using puppet from www.reductivelabs.com which defines a declarative language where you tell what should be done on a certain computer or on a cluster. We have about 10 servers (fileserver, database, web, computing,...), and about 30+ desktop machines where we try to provide a consistent work environment for the users. Puppet solves this in a wonderful and easy way. The software on the machines is not necessarily identical, here too puppet makes it easy to configure those. In contrast to cfengine(2) (which we have also used for a while) it is a lot easier to understand, and by the power of ruby it is easy to extend. Since you can define only statements of what should be done on a computer, it is a lot easier to understand what will happen on the machine.

We had some problems with FAI which we started using before debian had a well working preseeding and d-i The problem with FAI was, in my humble opinion, that it somehow did not work very well... everytime we had to install a computer, we first had to get FAI running again. This might have been our problem, because we used testing instead of srage, so very often things changed.

We are now using d-i with preseeding (which we get from a cgi-script) for the installation, this works always and with no problems, really!
After installation, the machine's configuration is managed by puppet.

Try it out, you'll like it.
bye,
udo.

On 13.07.2007, at 20:44, Roberto C. Sánchez wrote:

On Fri, Jul 13, 2007 at 09:03:26AM +0200, Sebastien JUST wrote:
Hello

I'm looking for software that could help me deploying, and keep track of installed software on my machines. We have more 10 Debian servers and 40
end-user machines.

If the machines are identical (or even very similar) in terms of
hardware configuration and installed software, then systemimager might
be what you want.

Regards,

-Roberto

--
Roberto C. Sánchez
http://people.connexer.com/~roberto
http://www.connexer.com

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