Spacewalk or similar for Debian?

["Karl E. Jorgensen" <karl@jorgensen.org.uk>]

Hi

Consider this scenario:

- 1000+ servers (lenny, squeeze and wheezy) at varying degrees of
  up-to-datedness with respect to security updates and general bug
  fixes.

- Demand for getting servers up-to-date. (They heard of heartbleed,
  but chose to ignore all my previous notifications of security
  problems. Go figure)

- Risk-adverse non-technical upper management (spreadsheet mania)

- Every update must be vetted and tested out first on development
  servers, then QA servers, staging servers and live servers. No
  exceptions.

My current line manager knows only RedHat, and thus wants
"spacewalk". (Because this is he used before. In a "proper
enterprise". And Thus proper enterprises use spacewalk).

Spacewalk looks sort of nice, but not quite the Debian way of
doing things.

And I cannot imagine that I am the first person with this problem...

How have others solved this?

My main concern here is the security updates and point releases: I'm
pushing for getting all the servers upgraded to wheezy anyway, and as
part of the upgrade they'll pick up any pending (at that point in
time) security updates.

-- 
Karl E. Jorgensen