Hi

> 
> 
>>At CERN we have about 1500 systems managed by individual
>>owners/users .. so we really need a solution which will
>>not require all of them writing / editing scripts ..
> 
> 
> Are these systems all pretty much identical to the packages that need to be
> checked on them? or do the owners/users have root privilege to install/modify
> whatever they want on the systems?

Not really : users have freedom to choose packages they install (and 
have full priviledges on their systems) - the requirement is that these 
have to be kept updated.

> I use another product (csync2) to help me manage large nodes of clusters,
> where I group "like" systems. 

For management of computer center clusters we are using
quattor (http://quattor.web.cern.ch/quattor/)
(used on about 3000 systems at CERN now)

> As an admin, I like the control this gives me, as I can manage everything from
> a central server.

Me too ;-) But in our environment this is not applicable
to large portion of our users...

> 
> The thing I don't like about automatic things is that implementations on
> servers become too messy over time. It becomes very hard to keep track of what
> packages are installed and especially keeping track of the dependencies those
> packages installed.

For that we have quattor which keeps such information in centralised
database. For users desktops we just make sure they update regularily
from our servers - that we keep track of it.
(plus that they have an easy to use mechanism to install additional 
software: on our internal network we provide so far dag and jpackage 
repositories mirrors .. thinking about adding few more)

Jarek
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