Where is my "everything" gone?

[Tony Heaton]

On Wed, 2006-04-12 at 18:17 +0200, Olivier Galibert wrote:


<SNIP>

> When was it decided that computer farms, servers and remote
> administration was unimportant, and only the desktop user was
> interesting?  Is it official, or just de facto?
> 
>   OG.
> 

How does not having an everything install translate to server farms etc.
being unimportant.  I have over 300 machines that I manage and I've
never used an everything install.  None of the system administrators
that I work with or talk to on a regular basis use an everything
install. This is a broad statement, but I don't imagine the majority of
system administrators would consider an everything install as best
practice.  An everything install is inherently less secure.  The system
administrators that I work with that use FC/RH use kickstart and
Cfengine.  The ones that use Debian, use preseeds and Cfegine.  By no
means am I saying that this way is correct or the only way.  It is at
least in my world the best practice and has been shown here to be more
secure out of the box.  Your everything is not the next guys everything.
Can you guarantee that everything contains the same subset of packages
from release to release?  I can guarantee that I install the same subset
of packages from release to release and therefore know what is on my
machines and I'm not surprised by something that might change in
everything.

However, I also feel that there should be some easy way of sharing a
selections list.  These lists would be submitted by users and be a
subset of packages that they use for a certain task.  This could include
several examples of "everything" that others use as well as all the way
down to minimal.  This way if a user didn't want to take the time to
pick and choose the packages they wanted they could just grab a list and
apply it to an install.  This work in the normal install method as well
as the kickstart method.


-- 
Tony Heaton

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