[Sheflug] Re: Updating a Mixed Network - or Just Linux ?

[Richard <nospam [at] sheflug.co.uk>]

Dear All

Owen asked me to forward this to the list.......

Listar wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 19, 2000 at 02:08:21PM +0000, Richard wrote:
> > One of the things that came up in conversation was the subject of
> > updating machines over a network.
> >
> > To explain his problem.   He wants to update all machines and he would
> > like to update just one machine with a 1.0 update and another machine
> > with a 2.5 update.  He came across this kind of thing whilst working
> > in his office at Manchester Computing Centre.
> >
> > I suggested that Webmin with an SSH module might be the answer.  He
> > said he'd never heard of it.


Let me clarify this; I had heard of webmin, since I had a bookmark
for it in my netscape bookmarks file; what I want is, however,
something
that webmin cannot currently do, as I understand it; that is, to
manage disparate machines as a unit.  I don't know what Richard means
by a '1.0 update' or a '2.5 update'.  What I mean is this: suppose
I have 500 or 1000 machines all running slightly different versions
of Linux.  To make the problem simple, you may assume, if you wish,
that they are all running the same distribution, but they may have
been installed at different times and with different software
installed on each of them.
 
I'd like a utility which I can configure to manage all of these
machines
at once, in that I can say to it `On any machine which is running
exim 3.13, please replace it with exim 3.16' and be certain that
exim will not get installed on machines that do not have exim
running.  Also I want it to make `sensible decisions' (however that
is defined!) about things like changes to config files.  Webmin is
a utility for managing a single machine (or a lot of single machines),
not for managing machines across a large enterprise.  And that's what
I'd like to see.  Anything which requires separate actions for
each machine is worthless to me.


So, there you are :)


-- 
Richard

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