On 7/19/11 6:43 PM, John R Pierce wrote:
to date, I've done all my administration on a manual 1 at a time basis, as each system has been pretty much unique.
its looking like I might need to setup a deployment of a dozen or 2 basically identical machines, all running pretty much the same sorts of stuff. I have zero experience with the sorts of management tools folks use to automate this type of configuration, both initial setup, and ongoing management (system updates, user application updates, configuration changes, etc).
anyone care to suggest any such tools, maybe some real-world pros and cons? of course, being centos, I prefer FOSS tools. for various reasons, this environment likely will NOT be virtualized (although I may emulate a test setup with vmware).
It doesn't take that much time to manage a server. For a dozen or two you probably can't save enough time to be worth setting up anything more than ssh keys on one that you use for management and a couple of scripts that loop over them to do things like 'ssh $host "yum -y update" that you might do frequently. For more ad-hoc things you can just open a bunch of terminal windows ssh'd to each and paste in the commands.
For the install you can copy the kickstart file that the first install creates to a web server and use it to duplicate the setup on the others. You might want something like backuppc to keep a history of recent copies of at least /etc and anywhere else you have modified files. If you do any complicated programming or scripting, you'll probably want subversion or some other version control system to manage the revisions.