Mass deployment and manage information system

[Benoit Guguin]

Hello,

We use Ubuntu as workstation, it's very nice and easy :).

But we search a way to deploy, manage and monitor ubuntu workstations 
over a lan.


So for the first part, the objective is to deploy workstation via PXE, 
TFTP with the minimum interactivity from the administrator.
We'd like to have the possibility to do an image for each type of 
workstation, backup image in order to save and reinstall quickly a 
workstation.

So we can use FAI, systemimager, LRS (linux Rescue server) or Kickstart.
We've seen that Ubuntu ported the kickstart utility from Redhat. We have 
found this utility is good but we don't think that we can use it for 
easy and quickly deployment on a wide lan.


The second part is to maintain up-to-date a workstation for security 
reason via a centralized management console, but we haven't seen any 
software to do this.
Another thing is to monitor workstations, for this task we have found 
Nagios and cacti. We suppose these tools are able to do the job well.

For HelpDesk, inventory, user support management we have found GPLI.


We also saw in the next Ubuntu release you will integrate LTSP.
This technology is a good way to answer some of our needs and resolve 
two points : mass deployment, maintain up-to-date workstations.

So we're still searching, and we'd like to know if you have some plans 
for the next release ?

Thanks in advance

ps : sorry for my poor english.

Some links :
a young and ambitious project to integrate  all functionnality in a 
single web interface : http://www.fani-project.org/
glpi : http://glpi.indepnet.org/?lang=en
systemimager : http://www.systemimager.org/
FAI : http://www.informatik.uni-koeln.de/fai/
Ubuntu with FAI :  http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/DeployingHoaryWithFAI
nagios :  http://www.nagios.org/
http://www.cacti.net/


-- 
Guguin Benoit
Société Alixen 2 rue Jean Rostand 91 893 Orsay Cedex France
Tel : 01 69 85 24 13, Fax : 01 69 85 24 10