[mdlug] Centralized package management tools

[Michael S. Mikowski]

cfengine?  I'm not sure of the feature set, but our systems group uses it for 
keeping configuration up to date for many hundreds of servers...

On Monday 01 December 2008 06:38:39 Wojtak, Greg wrote:
> Ah, the holy grail for CentOS/RHEL systems (aside from paying Red Hat
> $13,000 a year for a satellite server!).
>
> I am looking for the same thing (and I'm sure any other Linux Sysadmin
> is) for years.  I'm still using the strategy of "install updates on dev
> server, keep the rpm's that were downloaded, move them to test, then
> production, and pray to God that the same packages are in sync across
> all environments."
>
> Not very efficient.  I've been looking into building a yum server and
> configuring the yum-updatesd to download the packages that I roll out.
> A little better than using cron, but not by much.
>
> I'd be interested to hear if you find anything.
>
> Greg Wojtak
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org [mailto:mdlug-bounces at mdlug.org] On Behalf
> Of Michael ORourke
> Sent: Monday, December 01, 2008 9:29 AM
> To: MDLUG's main mailing list
> Subject: [mdlug] Centralized package management tools
>
> Lug nuts,
>
> I'm looking for some recommendations, specifically for the CentOS 5.2
> distribution, for a centralized package management system or tools.
> I've
> spent some time doing vaious Google searches, but haven't found what I
> was
> looking for aside from basic tools such as 'yum' and 'up2date', which
> are
> designed to run on a single host.  I was hoping that I would stumble
> upon
> some existing tools that could be leveraged in an existing environment.
> What I would really like is:
> * Gui tools (browser based).
> * Internal centralized server (package repository).
> * Centralized management (for development, QA, & production).
> * Ability to schedule updates and manually push updates.
> * Auditing capabilities (which servers have what packages installed).
> * Ability to manage servers by group (e.g. Dev App servers).
>
> Running 'yum -update' from cron on each server isn't a good strategy,
> especially when it comes to production systems.  I would like to have
> the
> capability to pull down patches to a centralized server, then push the
> patches/updates to the development/QA environment, and finally out to
> the
> production systems after testing is completed.
> Is that too much to ask for.  :-)
> Any suggestions/recommendations/ideas?
>
> Thanks,
> Mike
>
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