As far as keeping them "up to date", this is what we do:
- Have a local cvsup-mirror server
- All FreeBSD workstations and servers cvsup (just ports) off of it
nightly.
- Our central build server (which doubles as an insanely overpowered SMP
dns server), builds -STABLE, and all kernels nightly
When we want to upgrade a machine to current, we just:
mount buildbox:/usr/src /usr/src
mount buiildbox:/usr/obj /usr/obj
cd /usr/src
make installworld
mergemaster
cd /usr/src/sys/compile/<mykernel>
make install
reboot
This process takes about 15 min on our 100M/s network. We don't do it too
often of course, because of the downtime involved, but.
As far as keeping the machines "identical", you may want to look into one
of the hacks i've seen where in a school lab they boot off a floppy which
dd's the hard drives off of an nfs share. I can't remember where I saw
this unfortunatly.
(not sure if this answers your question, but I hope it odes)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Thomas R. Stromberg Senior Systems Administrator :
> smtp[[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Research Triangle Commerce, Inc. :
> http[afterthought.org] pots[1.919.657.1317] :
> irc[helixblue] FreeBSD Contributor, Perl Hacker :
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Forrest Aldrich wrote:
> There was mentioned that someone was "appointed" (perhaps unwillingly :) to
> look into this one... who?
>
> I was also curious about what people do to keep a fleet of FreeBSD machines
> up-to-date with CVSup and buildworld. I can't imagine manually going to
> more than 100 machines and doing the same thing manually... how time consuming.
>
> To summarize again, we are deploying status monitoring machines into POPs,
> across the US. Those machines are identical in terms of hardware, et
> al. We were hoping to find a means by which to streamline the installation
> process, such that we could create (say) custom boot floppies where you'd
> input minimum information (IP address, hostname, domain, etc.) and it would
> then go off and perform the installation (from fdisk, newfs... to editing
> packet filters appropriately, which make require a "template" of sorts).
>
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