All of our machines are identical... er at least the variety of machines
that we're planning to manage (thin-clients, servers). We do use tools
like system imager to image the boxes before they are deployed in the
field. I find apt appealing because it encourages our programmers to
compile their code and create debian packages, which promotes the idea
that we should keep our source code organized (something that has not
occurred in the past). I like debs more than rpms (no standardization)
and portage (emerge requires bulky rsync of makefiles). We can keep
track of changes, effectively rollout packages/releases with version and
revision control, downgrade, upgrade... etc...
I plan to use apt as a tool to do software rollouts and periodic
upgrades and security releases rather than dist-upgrades. If this works,
I would manage several private mirrors (stable, testing, unstable) of
our own in-house software and gnu software. Now the
apt-frontend-network-tool that I envision creating would act as sort of
a mass-network admin gui that facilitates running apt-get upgrade. I'm
ultimately thinking of a gui-tree-like-display of all the debian
machines on our network. There would be a way to change machines'
sources.list by the handful (highlight a bunch of machines and set them
for stable, testing, unstable, whatever). I would also like to employ
some sort of sync/imaging utility that could be used in case a machine
were to become corrupted and needed to be re-imaged via pxeboot or some
other method.
Fancy extra features may include links to startup VNC/SSH sessions to
any given machine on the network, having machines call home via a small
script or C app, report their mac address to an sql database, report
diskspace, mac address, assett tags, deliver alerts, etc...
But yeah, basically, there is no gnu utility that I have found that does
these sorts of things, and certainly not one that focuses on linux or
debian's packaging tools. If I can get my company to get excited about
this tool, I'd love to start up a project and see what we can get going.
Ben
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- Re: Upgrading thousands of boxes via APT Ben
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