On Monday 03 July 2006 09:26, rance@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> I'm open to nfs, ftp, or http content delivery to clients in case one
> or the other makes a difference.
If I wanted to set up and then support a large number of workstations, my
answer would perhaps be "hackish" but would work. YMMV.
1) Set up a yum repo webserver on the local network. This makes workstation
installations go much faster, and allows me to control the rollout of
updates.
2) Set up a single workstation with all the packages that you want.
-> Set up yum on the workstation to use the yum repo.
-> Use rpm -qa and make a stupid-simple "yum install `rpm -qa`" script out of
it.
-> Put the yum files (/etc/yum*) and the yum install script on the yum repo
webserver as a .tgz file.
3) Install new workstations with minimal installs of CentOS (only the first CD
is needed if you choose "custom" and then uncheck all packages) which takes
just a couple minutes per system.
4) wget the setup script that you built in #2, and run. Since it's all local,
it will install very fast.
With this method, I could probably set up 5-10 workstations per hour if they
were pre-built and had a fast network. This method has an additional
advantage of leaving the systems preconfigured to get updates that I could
control the rollout of.
I would additionally recommend setting up a cron script on each workstation to
do updates automatically ("yum update") every night at 3 AM. Grep for
"kernel" in the output to toggle an automatic reboot, if it makes sense.
I similar methods to set up Porn-filtering web-proxy servers. (that we sell to
schools) Thus, I can roll out security updates automatically for the entire
organization in < 24 hours while performing only a few minutes of work.
Again, there may be "better" ways to achieve the above, but the shell
scripting to support the above would take me about 4 hours to cook up, and
would work quite well.
-Ben
--
"The best way to predict the future is to invent it."
- XEROX PARC slogan, circa 1978
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