[olug] System management tools

[Dave Thacker]

On Friday 26 November 2004 18:06, Sean Kelly wrote:
> I am currently looking for tools and solutions for maintaining system
> configurations on many machines in a networked environment where each
> machine may run one of several OSes, have several different purposes, etc.
>
I've read the followups to this thread.  I'm in a situation where different 
distros, kernels, packages, and security options have raised my overhead 
considerably.   I'm now in the process of attacking the problem on several 
fronts.  
Most of these recommendations can be found in "The Practice on System and 
Network Administration" by Limoncelli and Hogan, or "Automating UNIX and 
Linux Administration" by Bauer.  
1. For the short term, we've adopted SuSE professional as our standard linux 
package.  I'm using autoyast2 to standardize and automate the installation 
process.  I'll eventually break this into different install scripts for 
different classes of machines.  
2.  I've been using rsync and cvs to distribute files across various machines, 
I'm going to start using cfengine to further centralize and standardize the 
process.   I've no experience to report so far, but my instincts tell me that 
a substantial investment of time up front will pay big dividends down the 
road.  
3.   I'm working on organizing the machines by class.  A class is defined by 
the work the server does, which defines the packages and security config the 
server needs.
4.   I'm trying to get standardized hardware.
5.   I planning on replacing Big Brother with Nagios.
6.  I'm still looking for a utility to tell me how a machine is currently 
configured.  One the utilities mentioned later in this thread looks 
promising.

DT