[mdlug] Centralized package management tools

[Mark Kimsal]

On Monday 01 December 08, Michael ORourke wrote:
> 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 know that urpmi has the ability to push package installation/updates across 
multiple hosts... but Mandriva is just a "newbie" OS.

> 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).

Weird... they don't have stuff like that out?  Sounds pretty easy, except for 
the auditing, but not entirely impossible.   I'm already working on a virtual 
host configuration tool, I might be able to add in scheduled rpm installation 
too.  But, it would require a lot of planning and testing from other people.  
I think the biggest obstacle to an open source solution is lack of hardware: 
who has 10 servers they want to donate to test a new tool?  I can easily 
write something to modify apache, bind, postgres, and postfix config files on 
one machine... but I don't have a cluster of computers to make anything work 
across a cluster.


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Mark Kimsal
http://biz.metrofindings.com/
fax: 866-375-1590