[CentOS] managing a rack full of centos servers

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Wed Jul 20 01:06:46 UTC 2011


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.

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com



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