Re: Automatic deployment and maintenance
Thanks for your answers.
Andrew Sackville-West a écrit :
I think you can probably use existing tools to do this without much
difficulty. I have no great experience in this, so ignore the obvious
failures on my part.
First off, can you run these end-user machines as net boot machines?
set up a terminal server and then you only have to update images for
these machines to pull at boot time.
Most important for me is that it should be a unique tool, that give me
the whole view of the current states of updates needed, repository
configurations... Views have to be synthetic, so I can connect a GUI,
view the states changes needed, in one eye drop.
Unfortunatly, no terminal server and no net boot for us.
For those who don't know, RedHat offers its customers the RedHat
network, wich is a fantastic tool to maintain your whole RedHat network.
if such a tool doesn't exist for Debian, maybe it's time I use some
Python or Php or Java stuff to write it.
I agree that the amount of tools available, via command line, shall help
in maintain everything. Much we definitivly need something more
user-friendly so people can handle the work for me - because anybody
isn't a command-line / bash / sh / python pro, think about any Windows
administrator that shall work with me ;-).
I dream of a software solution like this :
- web based,
- that could keep track of installed Debian machines,
- that owns its own repositories ( depending on groups of machines, say
Office, Server, Development, Advanced Users... )
you can run your own apt repositories and name then accordingly so
that the sources.list files on appropriate machines point to
appropriate targets.
yes I do agree
or if running a terminal server, run multiple images for the different roles.
- that can update its own repositories depending on available upgrades on
Debian Mirrors
again, running your own apt repositories would do this. there are
several ways to do it, so do some searching.
- that can push updates to installed machines,
I think pushing is a bad idea, better to pull.
I think the server should maintain the "order" for the client to update
itself. Then, up to the client to see this information, at next
connection, then download and upgrade
- keep track of OS versions, and packages diff
apt sort of does this automatically. What do you want to know?
Machine hardware, OS version, packages installed, packages needed to be
upgraded...
- manually push specific debian packages on machines, and ask machines for
updates
see higher
again pushing is probably not good. But you could set up something to
automate the pulling so that when you've tested updates on your
testing machines, you can set a flag somewhere to force the pulling
machines to automatically upgrade. cron-apt and others can do
automated, unattended upgrades, but you'd want to configure it so that
it only did so in certain circumstances. Maybe a tiered approach to
your own apt repositories. PUll upgrades into the first tier and
deploy on test machines. WHen you're satisfied, push those upgrades
into the next tier where all your machines can pull them automatically.
yes exactly
- show diffs between local installed packages and repositories
again, apt can do this easily, depending on what you need.
So, nothing real helpful I know, but maybe there's some helpful ideas
in there.
Anyway, any interested people in such a tool, maybe we can create a
small workgroup ?
A
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