s. keeling wrote: > Ben wrote: > > I was wondering if there's a Debian specific tool that could facilitate > > managing thousands of machines via APT. I'm aware that many people would > > recommend a sync option, where 1 machine serves as the master, and the > > others sync off of that. Perhaps that is the only reliable approach, but > > I thought I'd just check in w/ the list and see what people recommend. > > I'll answer that with, why would someone in your position not want to > do that?
I am not sure to which you direction you are referring. Why would someone administering a large number of machines not want to use APT? Why would someone administering a large number of machiens not want to use system images? On a server farm of identical machines using system images works pretty well. Tools like SystemImager, FAI, Mondo, etc. are great. But in an engineering desktop pool for a counter example there will be machine variations. In the case that variations are expected then images do not work as well. In which case I prefer to simply upgrade the machine with APT. APT is great for this and works very well. In my experience most environments have variations. Perhaps the largest groups of machines are identical. But other machines are different. In addition to compute servers there are always DNS/NTP/NIS/YP servers, NFS servers, LDAP servers, web servers, database servers, and others that don't quite ever fit a standard image. As soon as I need to deal with these variations I find that using APT for everything is just easier. But as always every environment is unique. An informed and reasoned decision is always best even if it might not make sense to people not involved in the process. Bob -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
