I seem to have started a Debian thing in the company that I work for. It seems to be spreading. As the number of machines that we configure with Debian grows, system administration issues start to raise their ugly heads. We've recently gotten a dedicated sysadmin guy to take over the admin tasks. He is very knowledgeable on Solaris, HPUX, and probably some others, but is new to Linux. He and I are having a bit of a debate right now as to the most effective way to manage these machines.
We've got NIS running and all user accounts are automounted from a Sun Sparc running Solaris. We have a mixed Solaris, Linux installation. So far so good. What our sysadmin would like to do (this is typically what he does for other Unixes) is to install client machines with a very basic set of functionality. Then he would compile each application that would be provided and install it into a directory in /home (e.g. /home/cvs/bin), which would also be automounted when necessary from one of the client machines. I see this as a little silly when, for Debian at least, nearly all of the applications we use are easily installed on all the machines in the normal Debian way. Our sysadmin sees the Debian way as interesting, but a requirement for him to visit 25 machines instead of 1. My question is, is there anyone out there, preferably a sysadmin type, who has experience with this type of thing and could give us some advice. Thanks... Steve
