Bulk updating dozens of (not identical) servers

[James Gray]

On 28/01/2011, at 3:35 PM, Carlos A. Carnero Delgado wrote:

> Hi there,
> 
> the number of servers we have in my organization -- both physical and
> virtual -- is slowly increasing at a steady pace, and the trend will
> continue for the foreseeable future. It has come to the point that
> apt-get upgrading && updating each one individually, and manually, is
> really time consuming and prone to errors. We're looking into stuff
> like Puppet and Cfengine, and it seems that either will do fine, but
> we have this "feeling" or notion that they're a little bit heavyweight
> for our needs. Not to mention the learning curve.
> 
> So, in the context of *only* dealing with installed packages updates
> in an automated way[1] and having 8.04 and 10.04 LTS releases in
> service, do you guys recommend anything? Did you write custom code?
> Has anyone seen Fabric in the context of systems administration?

+1 for the Puppet (or any other configuration management system you feel more comfortable with).  I've used bconfig at a previous place and managed several hundred servers with vastly differing configurations.  Admittedly, within that corpus of servers, there was a modicum of commonality between classes of servers; such as all the MySQL servers, all the mail servers, all the file servers, etc.

As Clint Byrum has mentioned, a configuration management system is a great asset with flow-on benefits too.  A little pain initially for a LOT of gain in the long term.

Cheers,

James
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