[Techtalk] keeping packages in sync

[Elwing]

On Feb 18, 2010, at 11:50 AM, Kay Nettle wrote:

> Those of you that support multiple machines, how do you keep your 
> machines in sync?  We have a somewhat different setup right now.  We 
> do a server install, delete some packages and add others, then build 
> most of the software in house (X, gnome, kde, several versions of gcc, 
> etc).  If there is a security update, we install it on one machine and
> rdist that around to all our linux hosts.  We went with building almost
> everything because we were trying to make all our platforms look as
> close to the same as possible. 
> 
> We've gotten rid of most of our other platforms, although we still have
> a few solaris machines out.  Since we are 99% linux, we thought we'd try
> to switch to using all ubuntu packages (or as much as we can).  I don't
> want to use rdist anymore, one of my co-worker has suggested that we use
> pkgsync.  I want to be able to install the updates on one machine, test
> if it breaks anything, then have all the desktops (~600) install the
> updates.  Is anyone using pkgsync?  Does anyone have any suggestions
> (other than rolling my own setup)?
> 

I've never use pkgsync, but what we did at a department at the university down the road from you (A&M) is set up our own package server and force desktops to get their updates from there.  That way, we could test first (by grabbing from the "real" source), then upload it to our server and then all the rest would get it once they ran their update scripts (weekly in our case).  It also lets you compile your own stuff with different options, etc.  

Elwing