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 __ ------------------------------------------------------- _ Jaroslaw_Polok ___________________ CERN - IT/FIO/LA _ _ http://home.cern.ch/~jpolok ___ tel_+41_22_767_1834 _ _____________________________________ +41_78_792_0795 _