Hi all, this must have been discussed before but I can't find a clear answer with Google so here it goes: In large corporate/enterprise environments with hundreds or thousands workstations and laptops a centralized management tool is a must and any home-made scripting solution hacked by those two geeks working in the basement is too fragile solution so something proven and tested would be needed. For RHEL there's RHN/Satellite Server (1) which probably works, for Ubuntu there's Blueprint (2) coming, but is there anything that would support at least a mixture of Fedora/CentOS installations and is available free (in all meanings, ruling Satellite Server out)? Probably something like Yum + Cfengine could be bended to do most of the work but as said having a home made system for managing thousands of systems doesn't sound a bright idea. And just going 100% to RHEL is not always a solution as many developers will get benefits by using tools present in Fedora but not in RHEL and some hardware (especially laptops) are hard to get running without using the latest distro available. Below is a list I imagine that would be needed, most of these are from the Ubuntu Blueprint's requirements: 1. Automatic upgrade to a particular version of selected packages 2. Kickstart new client machine with the appropriate version of Ubuntu (specific to a hardware configuration and role) with all the associated packages selected by the IT department of the company 3. Ability to change configurations and rules (including firewalls et al) centrally and push them to the client machines 3a. Ability to execute remote commands on a given set of clients 4. Monitor and record list of packages installed in a laptop or workstation 4a. Any abnormal status reported by e-mail or others means to admins 6. Stagger the updates and upgrades so that all machines do not suck-in bits at the same time So if anyone has suggestions or even experiences with a tool to handle these kinds of tasks in large environments it would very interesting to hear about them! 1) https://www.redhat.com/rhn/ 2) https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/enterprise-management-features Thanks! __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
