Server management

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Mon, 02 Oct 2006, Mattias Hemmingson wrote:

> We are planning to bulid upp more schools with edu.
> And im now lokking for som system to managent several servers.
> So if a install a packege on one master server the other servers will follow the master.
> 
> Anyone ??

I've heard of some very clueful people doing part of this by creating a
dummy .deb package which depends upon all the software they want installed.
So, they create a single package (or packages) which depends upon
edubuntu-desktop and any other stuff which they would like to add in (eg
apache2).  Then when they set up a new server they select that package and
all the right stuff goes into place.

If they decide to deploy some new package, they can just update the
package's dependencies and run "apt-get dist-upgrade" on each server.

If you need to tweak packages, it's quite feasible to make your own little
debian repository with your custom packages and point all of the servers
at that.

	http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/20
	http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/332

You might also want to look at systems like munin, nagios, logcheck,
zabbix, etc. for monitoring the servers.  Again these can all be deployed
by adding packages to your dummy deb package.

Gavin