Linux Centralized Administration

Thu Jan 12 21:11:21 UTC 2012

On Thu, Jan 12, 2012 at 1:02 PM, Paul Stewart <paul at paulstewart.org> wrote:
> Hey folks. just curious what people are using for automating updates to
> Linux boxes?
>
>
>
> Today, we manually do YUM updates to all the CentOS servers . just an
> example but a good one.  I have heard there are some open source solutions
> similar to that of Red Hat Network?

There's no tool I could recommend that would be very close to RHN.
However, for solving the problem of keeping packages up to date and
systems in a known-state, I would recommend checking out some
configuration management tools.

There are several popular ones nowadays, though I personally prefer
Puppet or Chef.
Both are tools that allow administrators to declare what a system
should look like, and abstract away the hard work of making that
happen on a variety of platforms. In both cases, it's possible to
monitor how well those tools are working and what they're doing in the
background so that you can get an idea of what's up to date and what's
not.

Are you just trying to solve for making sure that packages are up to
date? Making sure that running daemons are also up to date?

Cheers,
jof