On 7/19/11 6:43 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
> to date, I've done all my administration on a manual 1 at a time basis,
> as each system has been pretty much unique.
>
> its looking like I might need to setup a deployment of a dozen or 2
> basically identical machines, all running pretty much the same sorts of
> stuff. I have zero experience with the sorts of management tools folks
> use to automate this type of configuration, both initial setup, and
> ongoing management (system updates, user application updates,
> configuration changes, etc).
>
> anyone care to suggest any such tools, maybe some real-world pros and
> cons? of course, being centos, I prefer FOSS tools. for various
> reasons, this environment likely will NOT be virtualized (although I may
> emulate a test setup with vmware).
It doesn't take that much time to manage a server. For a dozen or two you
probably can't save enough time to be worth setting up anything more than ssh
keys on one that you use for management and a couple of scripts that loop over
them to do things like 'ssh $host "yum -y update" that you might do frequently.
For more ad-hoc things you can just open a bunch of terminal windows ssh'd to
each and paste in the commands.
For the install you can copy the kickstart file that the first install creates
to a web server and use it to duplicate the setup on the others. You might want
something like backuppc to keep a history of recent copies of at least /etc and
anywhere else you have modified files. If you do any complicated programming or
scripting, you'll probably want subversion or some other version control system
to manage the revisions.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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