Linux Centralized Administration

[paul at paulgraydon.co.uk (Paul Graydon)]

On 01/12/2012 03:51 PM, chaim.rieger at gmail.com wrote:
> On 1/12/2012 4:43 PM, Jimmy Hess wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 3:02 PM, Paul Stewart<paul at paulstewart.org>  
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Today, we manually do YUM updates to all the CentOS servers . just an
>>> example but a good one.  I have heard there are some open source 
>>> solutions
>>> similar to that of Red Hat Network?
>>>
>> Something to think about before attempting to centrally manage, your
>> systems actually have to be centrally manageable -- that doesn't happen
>> automatically and requires extra work.
>>
>>
> this is why i never update. i would rather build a new image and 
> deploy it to the thousands of servers than worry about updates. be it 
> an openssh security notice, or new ntp configuration, for me it is 
> easier to rebuild servers than update config files.
>
For that matter, imaging is a bad way to go about handling this, you'd 
be better served by setting up something like Puppet or Chef and have 
them handle configuration management for you centrally, along with 
necessary software packages.

Paul