Re: Administration (+apt-get dist-upgrade) of 100s of machines
Douglas Allan Tutty dtutty-at-porchlight.ca |volatile-lists| wrote:
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.
Aaaaaa! What is *THIS*? "manual" contra "automatic"? This sounds
interesting! I just use
# apt-get install bla-bla-bla
Didn't know apt/dpkg kept track of and internally distinguished between
manual and automatic installs. I was always curious about why it didn't
distinguish between packages I explicitly ask to have installed and
prerequisites for those pacakges and now I find that it does!!!
I'll have to look into that! Can I query & change this from the command
line?
With stable, you should only get security updates which
should not cause package breakage.
Here goes this term "package breakage" again. Do you know what it is and
how it arises? Most of the time, dist-upgrade just decides to install a
couple of extra packages. But some other times... I just never figured
out what makes the difference and what the possible problems and
solutions are. I just pray and try my best...
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?
Dunno. Haven't tried. Don't really like interactive programs for 100s of
installations.
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?
The thing is these are production machines that accumulate data. So I
don't want to be re-installing them all the time. And I want to keep
them up to date... So imaging will get me started, but I'm still left
with this problem to solve.
Thanks for your post!!
Peter
--
Peter Valdemar Mørch
http://www.morch.com
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