[CentOS] redhat spacewalk

[Les Mikesell]

Joseph L. Casale wrote:
>> Thanks, but that doesn't help much with my question since I haven't used
>> RHN either.  I'd like to have some comprehensive
>> inventory/monitoring/deployment tool but it has to work across different
>> platforms.  Ocsinventory-ng works for computer hardware/software
>> inventory and has some (not very usable) deployment features,  OpenNMS
>> can monitor about anything, Racktables can show layouts and store
>> configurations, but each of these have separate databases and interfaces
>> with big conceptual differences.  Is there anything that combines the
>> operations that people actually have to do to mange data centers in one
>> (preferably free) tool?
> 
> Well it looks like it does rhel/centos/fedora/solaris which just leaves windows
> for me. (Caught the Solaris bit off the wiki)

We're probably 90% windows.  Clonezilla mostly works for initial 
deployment across platforms as long as the hardware is close to 
identical but most of the other tools make linux the odd special case.

> What don't you like about Ocsinventory-ng?

As an inventory system it doesn't handle network devices.  The windows 
agent sometimes stops reporting on 64-bit systems - and doesn't have a 
way to extend what it can report about the client.  The deployment 
scheme doesn't give fine-grained control of when each target will 
install something (might be OK for a bunch of desktops with all night to 
complete, not so good for members of a server farm providing a critical 
24/7 service).

> OpenNMS is very nice:) Too much learning curve, no time atm. I use Nagios, and
> would love to move off it to Zenoss but it looks like the support around zenoss
> isn't as good.

OpenNMS does more automatically with the default setup than anything 
else I've seen but there are still a lot of special cases.  They are 
adding some hooks to other tools for provisioning but so far nothing 
that I'm likely to use.  It has some inventory concepts of its own, but 
not complete enough and too closely tied to IP addresses to be useful.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
     lesmikesell at gmail.com