RHN style Satellite Server for Ubuntu

[Sebastian Heinlein]

Am Montag, den 05.03.2007, 21:32 +1100 schrieb David Dean:
> Hi,
> 
> Is anyone working on an centralized server management system for Ubuntu?
> 
> The basic functionality being distributing commands over "groups" of
> servers, checking patch levels remotely, centralized health-checks,
> and so on. In large install bases this is quite handy - and it would
> be great if it were possible to simply mirror the common repos and
> then farm them out internally (which can be done, but not easily
> enough that it's click-and-point).
> 
> I am thinking of starting on some scripts to achieve RHN-style
> management of multiple machines, unless this can already be declared a
> solved problem?
> 
> Thanks,
> David
> --
> David Dean
> +61 402 55 6068
> dave.dean at gmail.com

Have you already looked at this:

http://www.howtoforge.com/installing_puppet_on_ubuntu

I haven't done this yet. So I cannot make any recommendations on this.

Personally I use nagios for the monitoring part.

Furthermore I worked on a prototype that does allow remote package
management - it was based on python twisted.

The main problem using apt remotely is the possibility to run
interactive scripts in the postinst. Some maintainers "mis-"use this
capability to ask the user question about the installation, instead of
using debconf. So you need to transfer the file descriptor of the
installer terminal over the network too.

I haven't yet resolved this issue (and I am unsure if I am capable to do
so :), but mvo works on transfering the fd over a UNIX socket (this will
allow to separate the dist-upgrade tool into a graphical frontend and a
backend that would survive a X breakage).

The company gonicus (http://www.gonicus.de) works on the Linux
deployment project of the city of Munich. Perhaps a package management
tool could be integrated into their admin interface too. I met one of
the developers last year on a trade fair, but lost contact.

If you are interested we could join forces!

Cheers,

Sebastian
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