Deploying Red Hat Workstations

[Michael Mansour]

Hi,

 --- Christopher Ness <nesscg at mcmaster.ca> wrote: > On
Tue, 2004-03-16 at 12:48, Chris Purcell wrote:
> > 1) each workstation would execute a cron job daily
> that would download a
> > script from our central server each day
> > 2) that script would be executed by another cron
> job a few minutes later.
> >  This script will contain any changes that I need
> to make.   If there
> > aren't any updates for the day, then the script
> will be blank that day.
> 
> You will likely want some feedback about what
> succeeded and what
> failed.  Assuming every install is successful would
> be a mistake.
> Have each machine upload the results or email them
> to someone.
> 
> > Will this work?  There has to be something better
> than this out there.
> 
> Sure it will work.  But...
> 
> Why not create a local "up2date" server on your LAN
> that will only hold
> the packages you want your machines to have.  I'm
> assuming you want them
> all to be the same, correct.  Then set up2date to
> update automatically
> from the 'up2date' local server.  Very little
> outgoing network traffic
> and you control the packages/versions.  Seems good
> to me.
> 
> I'm not sure how to set up an "up2date/yum/apt-get"
> server but maybe
> someone else has some experience.

Webmin has the ability to "Cluster" machines. In this
type of configuration I'd seriously take a look at
Webmin to manage these machines and Cluster update
anything I need to update. It also has the ability to
run cluster crons, synchronise users and groups among
all members of the cluster, update RPM's, deb's, etc
packages across the cluster and so on.

I use it on around 10 servers at the moment, and find
it extremely useful. With the number of workstations
you seem to want to manage, I reckon this would be a
pre-requisite.

Michael.

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